Laravel, codesleeve asset-pipeline not working - laravel

Question

I am trying to get codesleeve asset-pipeline to work on my site. After wasting a full day, I finally got it working yesterday on my local development server. I have now uploaded the project to see if everything works on the live server. Guess what- it doesn't. I am guessing the problem is to do with the environment setting, ie:
$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
'local' => array('your-machine-name'),
));
So, I have changed that to my machine name when on my local server, which, as I say, I have working. So on the live server, what should this be? "localhost"? I have tried adding another array key for 'live' with my live server's IP address and domain name, as per this answer: http://tinyurl.com/pg6hwum Nothing works.
Also, according to the tutorials I am following:
When you are in the local environment, you will notice that all of your asset files will be included individually ... Once you are in the production environment, all of your assets will be concatenated into one.
That doesn't seem to be the case for me either, as pipeline seems to be half-working, ie. it is concatenating my js and css files, but somehow messing them up.
I'd really appreciate some pointers, as I have wasted a colossal amount of time with this thing now. Thanks.

Answer 1

First set your environment settings on your bootstrap/start.php file into something like this:
$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
'local' => array('http://localhost', '*.local', 'http://local.sitename'),
'development' => array('http://dev.sitename.com'),
'production' => array('http://www.sitename.com', 'http://sitename.com'),
));
Second you need to check what enviroment does your laravel is running to check if your environment setup is working properly. By doing this:
App::environment()
So by doing that..you should have idea now what is causing the problem on codesleeve asset-pipeline.
note: see the documentation about environment for more details here

Answer 2

Asset pipeline will out of the box behave differently when on production compared to another environment (like local). I have put in a proposal to document some of these pain points and troubleshooting for new comers.
If you are using the most current version then there are two big behavior changes when switching environments:
caching - production assets are cached. This means once you load a page you will be stuck with those assets until you do
$> php artisan assets:clean
This is why you should set your environment to local when developing.
minification - assets are minified on production only. This can cause issues though because the minifiers sometimes break on code. There are some workarounds you can do to fix this. Something I normally do when having issues with a certain file (say Twitter Bootstrap) is use the .min.css extension which is then skipped by the minifier and written out as-is.
Note that this behavior is out of the box and can easily be modified by editing your configuration.
$> php artisan config:publish codesleeve/asset-pipeline
Then edit your file app/config/packages/codesleeve/asset-pipeline/config.php. For more information on these options visit the documentation here.
Hope this helps.