gravitystorm left a comment (openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#6677)
When everything is running smoothly, rails will compile the assets
(stylesheets, images and javascripts) on the fly, and take care of everything
when the files are changed on disk. This is similar to the ruby code - e.g. you
don't need to restart the rails webserver when you change a ruby code file -
rails notices automatically, and takes care of everything.
Note the caveat with "running smoothly".
> `docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rake assets:precompile`
When you precompile the assets, then rails will use those compiled versions in
preference to anything else. So if you've run the `assets:precompile` at any
stage, you then need to manually run it again any time you want to see your
changes to stylesheets or javascript files.
For this reason, it should only really be used for production, not development.
However, there's various edge cases that can stop the automatic asset pipeline
from working in the development environment and these situations can be hard to
debug. So many people immediately reach for `rails assets:precompile`,
especially if they are not working on anything related to the assets, and the
problem (seemingly) goes away. This workaround then gets into our installation
notes, into stackoverflow, into LLMs, etc etc and becomes normalised.
That's not to say we shouldn't mention it, because for example it took me
months to figure out what was going wrong the last time the automatic assets
system broke on my machine (and I relied on repeated `assets:precompile` until
I figured out that something in `rails_dir/tmp` was causing hash mismatches in
the urls).
I'm very open to either changing or removing the mention of `assets:precompile`
from DOCKER.md, I think it's probably unhelpful at present. There might also be
something specific to our docker setup that's interfering with the automatic
recompilation, in which case that should be investigated and fixed - or it
might just be that avoiding precompilation makes everything work fine.
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