Rails, javascript not loading after clicking through link_to helper

Are you using Rails 4? (Find out by doing rails -v in your console)

This issue is probably due to the newly added Turbolinks gem. It makes your application behave like a single page JavaScript application. It has a few benefits (it’s faster), but it unfortunately breaks some existing events like $(document).ready() because the page is never reloaded. That would explain why the JavaScript works when you directly load the URL, but not when you navigate to it through a link_to.

Here’s a RailsCast about Turbolinks.

There are a couple solutions. You can use jquery.turbolinks as a drop-in fix, or you can switch your $(document).ready() statement to instead use the Turbolinks 'page:change' event:

$(document).on('page:change', function() {
    // your stuff here
});

Alternatively, you could do something like this for compatibility with regular page loads as well as Turbolinks:

var ready = function() {
    // do stuff here.
};

$(document).ready(ready);
$(document).on('page:change', ready);

If you are using Ruby on Rails >5 (you can check by running rails -v in the console) use 'turbolinks:load' instead of 'page:change'

$(document).on('turbolinks:load', ready);