Why are rails assets broken?

Question

I'm running a rails app with passenger on my personal server (running debian) and i seem to have an issue with assets. First it was some images that were broken that i put in app/assets/images/slideshow. I was able to get these images to render by running "rake assets:precompile" and that fixed the images, but this also killed the glyphicons from the bootstrap slideshow i'm using.

How should i be handling this process? should i be doing precompile at all? it seems somewhere i'm missing something in the process.

Right now the glyphicons want to point to /assets/bootstrap/glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff but the icon is actually at assets/bootstrap/glyphicons-halflings-regular-cf24e42fad297dbaa33853187ba876e7.woff

Answer 1

Actually. it seems that i solved this in production by running

    RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

I'd still like some clarification of assets if someone feels like it