Vfrdtyky

I've gotten this weird error message that keeps me from working on my application.

undefined method `start_with?' for nil:NilClass

with line 5 highlighted in my app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag    'application', media: 'all', 'data-turbolinks-track' => true %>

The error seems to come out of nowhere. The first time I got it I had attempted to load CarrierWave. I got through ReadMe but it didn't work so I tried to back out of the installation.

When I comment out this line the app loads but with no bootstrap formatting at all. I initially focused my search with CarrierWave, deleted and re-installed the gem, but was unsuccessful and found nothing really pointing me in the right direction. I spent days on this. Finally, I reached out to a mentor who pulled my code down from github and found no errors. The app worked fine for him. I pulled down a previous, known working commit, and it worked for me as well. So, although not solved I could continue working on my app (having to re-do some work). Now, the problem has reappeared while working on my app. Not CarrierWave this time, just normal editing. Without warning the application just stopped loading but with the same start_with? error message on my app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file.

I've spent a considerable amount of time searching for answers and a permanent fix on Stackoverflow.

Solutions that seemed to work for others, but HAVE NOT worked for me are:
1. Remove //= require_tree . from application.js, and
2. Downloading and installing node.js

Some posts support the thought that the idea that the issue is local and would only show up in dev, not prod. I'm only working in dev at the moment. While there's a lot of other info, I've struggled with this for days now and feel that every possible solution gets me further down a rabbit hole that is completely foreign to me. I am a newbie...about 3 months into my knowledge on Ruby. I'm really not even sure what code to add here because I can't seem to isolate the issue. I only know that formatting seems to be affected when I comment out line 5 (as above).

Trust me when I say I've searched quite a bit. I'm very hard headed, but optimistic I can find an answer if given the time but I'm stumped here and just want to move on with learning to create with Ruby/Rails.

My gem file is below. Perhaps I'm missing something very obvious.

ruby '2.2.0'



source 'https://rubygems.org'



group :production do

  gem 'pg'

  gem 'rails_12factor'

end





gem 'font-awesome-sass'

gem 'bootstrap-sass'

gem 'simple_form'



gem 'devise'



gem 'seed_dump'



gem 'rails', '4.2.0'

group :development do

  gem 'sqlite3'

end

gem 'sass-rails', '~> 5.0'

gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'

gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.1.0'

gem 'jquery-rails'

gem 'turbolinks'

gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.0'

gem 'sdoc', '~> 0.4.0', group: :doc



group :development, :test do

 gem 'byebug'

 gem 'web-console', '~> 2.0'

 gem 'spring'

end

Application.js

//= require jquery

//= require jquery_ujs

//= require turbolinks

//= require_tree .

//= require bootstrap-sprockets

The only other info I can provide is that I've scaffolded my resources and used devise to create my User model.

Thanks. I'm in your debt if you can help me solve this. I am new, but I want to learn.

I came across this same issue myself maybe my solution will help you out. Check your /app/assets/stylesheets/application.scss file for "bootstrap-spockets". Commenting this out solved it for me.

Thanks this helped me work out a bit more of whats going on. Seriously unhelpful error message.

Commenting out $icon-font-path in _variables.scss worked for me. If you have a look you will see that there is a [converter] comment that says:

If $bootstrap-sass-asset-helper if used, provide path relative to the
assets load path. This is because some asset helpers, such as
Sprockets, do not work with file-relative paths.

If you are not using the fonts just comment it out. If you need to use them set $bootstrap-sass-asset-helper to true and set the path as needed. That also worked for me.

It seems that the order is important here, the following order - if bootstrap-sprockets is defined before bootstrap - causes this error

@import "bootstrap-sprockets";

@import "bootstrap";

while this order seems to work

@import "bootstrap";

@import "bootstrap-sprockets";

Whether it's connected to the issue or not, uncommenting "bootstrap-sprockets", and changing the $icon-font-path and $icon-font-name to @icon-font-path and @icon-font-name (app/stylesheets/_variables.scss under Iconography) appeared to solve this and an additional issue I was having with glyphicons not displaying. Not sure exactly how but all appears to be working. The syntax errors in my controllers were likely coincidental. Although it wasn't the exact solution, @TheRealSeanReid pointed me in a direction that appears to have worked. Credit is deserved. Thanks @TheRealSeanReid.

I had this problem as well, but what was causing it was an incorrect value passed into an image-url() helper in a .scss file. We had background-image: image-url('./image.png'); instead of background-image: image-url('image.png');

In my case, the problem was actually that sprockets-rails was looking to load a non-existent path. This was happening because I passed a regex to the list of assets to precompile and sprocket-rails made a bad guess as to the asset's relative path. More information in this issue here:

https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails/issues/269

bower-rails gem was causing it for me.

probable reason:

bower was attempting to load a non-existent path

just commented out the gem and its config files for now.

a precise probe to pin-pointing of the cause remains subject to available time. bower-rails is not so critical for the project right now.