How to work with compass & sass? - sass

Should I put all of my css in the sass folder with the .scss files, afterall .scss ends up being used in the .css files? How should I decide when to use the .scss & .css.

Compass puts your .scss files in your_rails_app/app/stylesheets, and remain your css files in your_rails_app/public/stylesheets by default, for reason. Personally I'll follow it's convention if there is no other issue.
You should always write .scss files, and let compass compiles them into .css files for you. Just place all your old css codes into your screen.scss file first, and clean it up into more structured code while you have time.
After using compass, .scss is your source code, the place you write styles; .css become some machine generate, less-readable files that better execute by machines only. You'll never (hopefully) touch them anymore.

Related

Compile multiple SASS files in multiple directories, into multiple CSS files in a separate, single directory

I need to compile multiple sass files in one directory into multiple corresponding css files in another directory. Eg:
src/folder1/file1.scss --compiles to-- public/file1.css
src/folder2/file2.scss --compiles to-- public/file2.css
Here is the command I am using:
./src/*/*.scss ./public
Prior to attempting this, I was compiling all .scss files in place using just ./src/*/*.scss, and was getting the corresponding .css files in their respective directories. Trying to dump these in a different directory, however, is not working. What is happening instead is that one of the .scss files imports a .scss partial an import statement into the .scss file itself, a .scss.map file is created, and nothing else happens after that.
Does SASS even have this capability? I've tried different variations of the above command and occasionally I'll see an error saying that 'public' is a directory, which leads me to believe SASS doesn't allow a directory as the output. In fact, the documentation only provides a single output file as the example for compiling SASS (i.e. sass input.scss output.css).
I'm using NPM scripts as a build tool so please no Grunt, Gulp, etc.
*One other thing to note. I just tried using sass --watch instead of the normal compile command, and it sort of does what I need it to:
sass --watch src:public
The only issue I'm having with this is that it does not create only css files in public. Instead it creates a folder and a .css and .css.map file in the folder. It seems SCSS will add a path for each .scss file respective to the relative path traversed by watch. This solution would be ideal if it would not create this extra folder.
You can compile multiple sass files into multiple css files by specifying multiple source:output separated by a space like this:
sass --watch src/file1.scss:dist/file1.css src/file2.scss:dist/file2.css
You can change the src or output paths as needed.
You have to tell the sass watch what file you want it to output, just like this:
sass --watch style.scss:style.css
You can even set it to output a compressed css file (the .map file happens automatically for each css):
sass --watch style.scss:style.css --style compressed
I usually go to one file, but theoretically you can watch different scss files and compile them to separate css files, not sure why you'd want to?, but it can be done.
For anything you want to group, import the related files to a scss file then compile it down to one file, then repeat these steps.
(Note: I'm running the sass gem for the above commands in Node.)

Making small changes to scss files via FTP without having to re-upload all files

Please don't shoot me if this is a stupid question. My sass workflow looks like this. I navigate to the directory I'm working in and use the command sass --watch . to get it to watch the current directory. Then I usually separate my files into partials and import them into a main file. Once I'm happy with the changes I upload everything to the server.
Now however, I find myself in a situation where I want to make a quick visual change to something on my live site. Normally in CSS I would just download the style.css file make the change and re-upload it. The only way I could see this working in SASS is downloading all my scss files, typing in the sass --watch . command again, making that small change and then re-uploading everything via FTP.
Is this the only way? Is there an easier solution?
Are you just using sass to generate a css file in the command line? If so, you don't even really need to upload the sass files to your server. You can just upload the css file that sass --watch generates.
If you do want the sass files on your server though, you only need to upload the changed sass file(s) and any updated css file(s) that is generated.
If your main file imports _a.sass, _b.sass, and _c.sass and you only make changes to _b.sass, you would only need to upload _b.sass and the css that is generated, but make sure you have fresh copies of _a.sass and _c.sass locally before you make edits.

sass files are not working in Cactus 1.0.1

I am using Cactus 1.0.1. In my html I am using .scss file. As per the Cactus documentation, the .scss file will be support in cactus without installing any additional things. But it is not working and the page was rendered without stylesheet. Please help me to solve this issue.
You need to compile the .scss file into .css and make sure there is no errors parsed.
Your html page has to have the path to the .css file and not the .scss
To compile the .scss file you need to have sass installed in your local machine.
Here is the documentation on how to install and use sass
http://sass-lang.com/documentation/
Gnaneswaran, did you happen to create the .scss in its own sass directory, next to the css directory? If so, the corresponding .css file should be sitting in the same directory as your .scss file.
If that's the case you need to change the location of the style sheet in the head of your html file.

How to configure a SCSS project?

I'm pretty new to SASS/SCSS and got a git project with CSS Files in the main directory which shall import partials from a subdirectory. I was wondering if it's possible to install sass on the server, create a compass project so that css files will be created automatically after a live edit of the scss files on the server? Or does it have to be local with a filewatcher? I already tried to set up a compass project on the server but no css files were created automatically. Was it because of wrong settings or is it just not possible this way?
If it's possible is there a good step by step tutorial? I already found this
Maybe the problem is the path. In my config.rb I changed the path without knowing what to write in the string if sass and css directory are the same as project path. Didn't work with "/" or an empty string.
Both Sass and Compass provide watch commands. You can use either:
sass --watch input.scss:output.css (options)
or, assuming you've got your Compass config file correctly setting your css_dir vairable:
compass watch
Either of those should recompile the css file upon changes. If you want this done live on the server, you'll need to execute the watch command on the server.
To add a point to #aerook's answer,
In your projects you may have multiple scss and css files. In which case you may use the following to watch the entire scss directory to make changes in the css directory
sass --watch scss:css
PS : scss and css are folder names in the same directory path.

compass: You must compile individual stylesheets from the project directory

A while ago I was using compass to generate stylesheets from sass for a project.
Recently I returned to that project. I went to my sass directory and did "compass watch --debug .:."
This generated the error "You must compile individual stylesheets from the project directory".
I discovered that there was no config.rb in the directory. So I recreated one. It looks like this:
http_path = "/"
css_dir = "/css"
sass_dir = "/css"
images_dir = "/img"
javascripts_dir = "/js"
preferred_syntax = :sass
However, all of my attempts to use compass result in the same error, no matter what values I put in the config.
How do I get compass to actually process my sass?
just came across this problem too, and it has already been answered in the comment by Arnaud Valle.
But just for clarity, and people later searching.
Just creating a config.rb will not work, as compass does not recognise it.
The answer is just switch to your project directory(root) and then run
compass init
This will then create you a "working" config.rb, and two directories called sass, and stylesheets, in the sass directory will be a couple of start scss files.
If you do not want them, or want to use different directories, you can of course now edit your freshly created and working config.rb, and change your directories (and then delete the old automatically created ones)
Oh and i suspect your js will not be in a folder javascripts, so edit that to in the config.rb
Anyway having done that(or not) you should then be able to run
compass watch
and all should be good , i.e. your scss files get compiled to css files
As an alternative that I have not tried, but theoretically
compass compile [path/to/scss]
should work too, if you don't want to init compass
More information to be found in the compass documentation here
and to go completely over the top, if this is something you find yourself doing often, and hate the defaults then edit/add the following to your ~/.bash_profile
alias compass_init="compass init --syntax=sass --css-dir=css --javascripts-dir=js"
I usually have my config.rb in my project directory (or root) rather than the sass directory.
Folder structure would be like this:
config.rb
--- css
--- sass
Also your css_dir and sass_dir have the same value, which could lead to your issue as well.
Remove the "/" in front of your directory names.
This error occurs when your source path is incorrect. In your case, your directories have an extra "/". Removing them should fix your problem.
As others have said, creating a config.rb with compass init will fix it too.
Note that Config.rb is not necessary when using Grunt or similar runners that run compass. That might be how your project was running before without the config.rb file. The runner starts compass with all the paths and options in Gruntfile.js. Having paths/options in both Gruntfile and config.rb might cause problems.
Had this problem on windows 7 using Symfony with Gulp, i solved it using absolute paths like this:
gulp.task('compass', function() {
gulp.src('c:/wamp/www/mnv/src/Mnv/Bundle/MnvBundle/Resources/public/sass/*.scss')
.pipe(compass({
config_file: 'c:/wamp/www/mnv/src/Mnv/Bundle/MnvBundle/Resources/public/config.rb',
css: 'c:/wamp/www/mnv/src/Mnv/Bundle/MnvBundle/Resources/public/stylesheets',
sass: 'c:/wamp/www/mnv/src/Mnv/Bundle/MnvBundle/Resources/public/sass'
}))
.pipe(gulp.dest('c:/wamp/www/mnv/web/css'));
});
For anyone looking to compile SCSS without making a whole project (e.g., for a one-off page), you can just create a config.rb, but it needs at least two parameters: css_dir and sass_dir. (touch-ing it is not enough).
A minimal config.rb:
css_dir='.';sass_dir='.'
This effectively creates a compass project for the purpose of compiling simple files. You'll have to include the rest of the params if you want to use sprites, etc. Assuming compass can write to the directory, it'll create the .sass-cache directory once you run compass compile or compass watch for the first time.
It's also important to note that compass commands must be run from the directory with config.rb, or you'll get this error.
Finally, if you just want to take advantage of simple SASS features (and not Compass framework components), straight SASS is often simpler:
sass --watch foo.scss:foo.css
I experienced the same problem using gulp-compass-compile. Fixed that by changing srcDir option (that converts to --sass-dir option in compass compile call) for compass function from ./src/scss to src/scss. Hope that helps someone.

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