How do I find missing ribbon icons in a Sitecore 9 setup?

Question

I have Sitecore 9 installed on a couple of environments. On just 1 of the environments, the ribbon icons are visible in the XP editor.

In the other environments, no icons are appearing in the ribbon as shown in the screenshot above. Inspecting the frame source, I found out that there is a reference to a (seemingly dynamically generated) css file that is responsible for the icons showing up. The filepath is like: /sitecore/shell/Applications/Page%20Modes/Ouput/5022797587550786552.css. The part of the css file that is missing on the other environments is a couple of lines of the form at the end:

 .sprite-speak-ribbon-clean-ee.small { float: left; margin: 0 .4em 0 0; }
    .sprite-speak-ribbon-clean-ee.window_earth_24 { background-position: 0px -0px; width: 24px; height: 24px; }
    .sprite-speak-ribbon-clean-ee.small.arrow_fork { background-position: 0px -34px; width: 16px; height: 16px; }  etc etc
[shortened for brevity]

I wonder how Sitecore generates these files and why the css output could be different for the different environments while they all have the same Sitecore version installed. Possibly, more files and functionality are missing.

Answer 1

Sprites feature was introduced in Sitecore 9, so it bundles all ribbon icons by default and generates one big image (sprite). Make use that http://yourInstance/sitecore/shell/client/Sitecore/Speak/Ribbon/Assets/Sprites/Ribbon/sprite-speak-ribbon-clean-ee.png is available

Seems like in your case an image wasn't generated, one of the reasons is a lack of permissions for the file access, please check if sprite-speak-ribbon-clean-ee.png exists on file system.