For applications coming with lots of stylesheets and scripts, asset compilation might take quite long. This can be annoying when deploying a release that does not actually change assets.

Rails Long Term Support

Rails LTS provides security patches for old versions of Ruby on Rails (2.3, 3.2, 4.2 and 5.2)

• Prevents you from data breaches and liability risks
• Upgrade at your own pace
• Works with modern Rubies

Read more Show archive.org snapshot

When your app uses Sprockets, you can simply skip asset compilation and re-use the previous release's assets. [1]
That is especially easy via Capistrano. Capistrano will automatically symlink your release's public/assets to a shared directory, so all you need to do is skip the deploy:assets:precompile task.

Put the following code where you'd put other custom Capistrano tasks (default is lib/capistrano/tasks/*.rake)

if ENV['SKIP_ASSETS']
  Rake::Task['deploy:assets:precompile'].clear_actions
end

You can then set the above environment variable when deploying:

SKIP_ASSETS=1 cap staging deploy

Enjoy.

[1] Sprockets will pick any public/assets/.sprocket-manifest-*.json.