The asset pipeline changes the paths of CSS files during precompilation. This opens a world of pain when CSS files reference images (like jQuery UI) or fonts (like webfont kits from Font Squirrel), since all those url(images/icon.png) will now point to a broken path.

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In the past we have been using the vendor/asset-libs folder as a good solution to work around this.

When you migrate to managing vendor assets in Rails with Bower, the bower-rails gem comes with its own solution for this problem. It can rewrite your .css files so all occurences of url(...) are replaced by something like url(<%= asset_path(...) %>) in a .css.erb file ( code Show archive.org snapshot ).

You can do this manually by invoking a Rake task:

rake bower:resolve

... or you can configure your application to automatically resolve paths before precompiling assets:

BowerRails.configure do |bower_rails|
  # Invokes rake bower:resolve before precompilation. Defaults to false
  bower_rails.resolve_before_precompile = true
end