So I started fiddling about with a new Rails project and after finding a likely starting point, I immediately ended up with this:

Webpacker can't find application.js in

I'm old school Rails and I find the whole asset compilation situation, honestly, perplexing. The solution turned out to be:

bundle exec rails webpacker:install

after the normal:

git clone foo
bundle install
bundle exec rake db:migrate

I have no idea why the bundler install doesn't handle executing webpacker:install but cie la vie. The more things change, the more they stay the same …

Update: I kept at this and kept finding that I didn't have webpacker or some other portion of the rails stack running. I finally traced this down to things having changed. Traditionally I've always run rails as:

bundle exec rails s -pXYZ

And the new approach is to run:

bin/dev

which in turn contains:

 #!/usr/bin/env bash

 if ! command -v foreman &> /dev/null
 then
   echo "Installing foreman..."
   gem install foreman
 fi

 foreman start -f Procfile.dev "$@"

and the Procfile.dev file contains:

	web: bin/rails server -p 3000
	js: yarn build --watch
	css: yarn build:css --watch

I was literally missing the yarn command so part of the overall asset pipeline just wasn't running.

Old habits die hard.