Until recentlly I was using the rather awkward dotless. I'm restricted to what I can use somewhat because I'm using VS2010, however I came across ServiceStack Bundler which seems to work great... apart from one thing.
My Less files are split using a directory structure - to simplify things, like this:
scaffolding/my-scaffolding.less
utilities/my-utilities.less
ui/my-ui.less
Each directories has many files, particularly with mixins etc.
In order to link them together, I've been using the #import function.
My main less file - main.less contains the following:
#import "utilities/all-utilities.less"
All utilities are listed here as it enables me to plug and play various file-sets. This code previously worked ok.
However I find ServiceStack won't pick up changes unless I reference all the less files individually and directly through the bundle file, which is a bit of a pain.
So, I can't use: main.less and import all sub files.
Instead, I have to use:
utilities/util1.less
utilities/util2.less
utilities/util3.less
and so on.
I'm using the ms build function to compile.
Any ideas?
/* UPDATE */
Tried the recommended answer below without success.
This is what I've tried so far:
Call a single less file that contains all #import declarations;
Does not trigger updates on compile.
Call all less files from bundle file and add #import statements to less files where necessary (note bundler won't compile without these);
Duplicates the #imported code as many times as the #import statement is used - even when (reference) directive is used, resulting in bloated/incorrect code.
You should be able to modify Bundler's bundler.js file to specify additional paths that less should search for when processing #import directives:
function compileLess(lessCss, lessPath, cb) {
var lessDir = path.dirname(lessPath),
fileName = path.basename(lessPath),
options = {
paths: ['.', lessDir], // Specify search paths for #import directives
filename: fileName
};
less.render(lessCss, options, function (err, css) {
if (err) throw err;
cb(css);
});
}
A mistake on my part, but one which wasn't easily spottable, so I'll post the reason for my problems so that others don't spend hours as I did chasing a solution to an unecessary problem.
I was using ServiceStack Bundler - I believe this issue would also have occured on on any solution using npm's less library.
My main issue was that none of my changes were triggered on compile. I use lots of #imports and numerous sub-directories for my less files so my first thoughts were the problem was due to subdirectories, and later, due to #import statements. However neither was correct.
I defined a bundle: main.css.bundle
Within the bundle I called my main less file that contained all the other #imported files: main.less
The issue was that less would normally reserve main.css, but the bundle also gives its output the same name based on the bundle name. So both were conflicting.
Change the bundle name or the main less file name and all should work.
Related
I'm currently trying to learn how to implement SASS into my web development projects but I'm struggling a little bit with figuring out how to properly compile my .scss files into one single .css file.
When I run sass --version in my terminal, I receive 1.53.0 compiled with dart2js 2.17.3. As far as extensions go, I'm using Live Sass Compiler by Glenn Marks, and within the settings.json file, my configuration looks like this:
{
"liveSassCompile.settings.formats":[
{
"format": "expanded",
"extensionName": ".css",
"savePath": "/css"
},
],
"liveSassCompile.settings.excludeList": [
"**/node_modules/**",
".vscode/**"
],
"liveSassCompile.settings.generateMap": true,
"liveSassCompile.settings.autoprefix": [
"defaults"
]
}
This is my current project directory:
Current Project Directory Structure
My current issue is that whenever I click Watch Sass, the only file I want to be output is the main.css and main.css.map but it creates an index.css and index.css.map file as well.
I'm trying to implement something similar to the 7 - 1 SASS Architecture, and within each of those folders I created an index.scss that'll contain each file in it's directory, which will then be #forward to the main.scss.
Is there any particular way I can avoid the extra files being created? I'm not too familiar with npm but I've heard it would be more beneficial to learn it in order to utilize SASS as opposed to using a VS Code extension and I'm more than open to taking that approach and scrapping the entire extension as a whole if it proves to be more efficient.
Thank you for your help in advanced, I hope I provided enough information!
Dart sass comes with an inbuilt compiler
Just run the code
sass --watch sass/main.scss css/main.css
This one faulty line is probably the reason for your problem.
Change this:
"liveSassCompile.settings.generateMap": true,
to this:
"liveSassCompile.settings.generateMap": false,
If you decide to stick with my extension then you can specify a single file to output/watch with the liveSassCompile.settings.includeItems setting - as shown below
{
"liveSassCompile.settings.includeItems": [ "/path/to/main.scss" ]
}
Alternatively, and possibly a better solution, you can use a negative glob expression in the liveSassCompile.settings.partialsList to treat every other file as a partial. Then, when any SASS file is saved, it triggers compilation of just your main.scss file
For a new project I am bound to keep things webpack-only, and thus need to find a way to efficiently compile our stylesheets. Basically in a very gulh-ish way:
gather all less-files including glob-patterns like src/**/*.less (css order may be arbitrary)
also allow import of css files like, say ../node_modules/vendor/**/*.css or 3rdparty/master.less
(If I have to setup a bogus.js entry point for that, fine...)
And with all of that, a typical gulp workflow:
transpile less to css
merge (concat) less and css
have cssnano do its optimization job, with specific css nano options like e.g. orderedValues: false, normalizeWhitespace: true ...
write styles.css as final output
And of course:
have source-maps survive that chain for a styles.css.map
efficient watching and the usual lazy/incremental compilation (as gulp and webpack have it)
Something I do not need is css modules (css imported into node modules for 'scoped' use, coming out as hash-scoped selectors...)
How can a 'typical' less|css-processing toolchain be done in Webpack?
This SO question has my first attempt where I got stuck in config hell right in the middle after combining...
considerations so far (helpful or not)
I know, to webpack, any ressource including css or even font and images is a "module"... Rather than merging my css 'modules' with with actual js (only to later painstakingly separate them again later again), it might be wiser, to have an entry point cssstub.js in parallel – also known as multi-compiler mode.
But that's really, where my wisdom ends... doing a sequence of $things on a set of files in webpack seems really hard (unless it's a connected javascript module graph). I did find something on globbing, but that's not enough (merge css, cssnano,...) and mostly I simply can't glue the pieces together...
I have used gulp to build less and create corresponding maps like below:
First step compiles less and generated css in tmp folder
gulp.task('compile-less', function () {
gulp.src('./*.less') // path to your file
.pipe(less().on('error', function(err) {
console.log(err);
}))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./tmp/'));
});
Second step minifies generated css and create map files
gulp.task('build-css', ['clean'], function() {
return gulp.src('./tmp/**/*.css')
.pipe(sourcemaps.init())
.pipe(cachebust.resources())
.pipe(sourcemaps.write('./maps'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./compiled/css'));
});
If you want you can add additional step to conact generated css.
I know that L5 and Elixir are still under development, but I'm excited to start thinking about ways to reorganize my code. I think my question has more to do with asset management, in the context of L5 and Elixir.
Want to clarify how concatenation and versioning should be handled (in my case I'm using Elixir's styles() and version()). The issue I'm having is that the new file after concat/version will be located in a new folder, breaking any references to assets from the original css or js files.
For example, an original CSS file that has background-image: url('../img.png') will no longer work. I've tried a couple of things, but both are not ideal especially in the case of vendor plugins:
Move required assets over one-by-one (using mix.copy() for each folder of assets), to the new build path (ie. the build path used by Elixir's versioning).
Manually edit the paths in each asset file to refer to an absolute path
Although both of these options will make things work, I feel as though I may be missing something. It also becomes quite impractical when working with javascript plugins (ex. ones that come with their own images, fonts, stylesheets, etc).
Is there a more practical way of managing relative paths when concatenating and versioning?
Here is the solution for Laravel Elixir after you build for versioning.
For copy command you need reference it as full path.
var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Elixir Asset Management
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Elixir provides a clean, fluent API for defining some basic Gulp tasks
| for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Less
| file for our application, as well as publishing vendor resources.
|
*/
elixir(function(mix) {
mix.version('themes/default/assets/css/styles.css')
.copy('public/themes/default/assets/img/', 'public/build/themes/default/assets/img/');
});
EDIT:
I just submitted a pull request to Elixir, so you can just do:
mix.version(
['css/style.css', 'css/vendor/style.css'], //files to be versioned
['fonts', 'css/vendor/icons'] //dependent files/dirs to be copied
);
OLD ANSWER:
Actually, if you use mix.copy(...) alone, you just can't use gulp watch and you'll need to recompile your entire stack in order to get this working.
You can achieve the same results with the solution below and don't need to recompile everything, because it'll just work when you change a versioned file:
var shell = require('gulp-shell');
gulp.task('cp', shell.task(['cp -R public/fonts public/build/',
'cp -R path/to/vendor/dir public/build/vendor/',
'... etc ...']));
elixir(function(mix) {
...
//register a watcher to run 'cp' when you rebuild
mix.task('cp','public/build/**/*.(js|css)');
}
They are relative paths - so keep the relative relationship.
Just move the images over to the public/build/ directory as part of the gulp command, after the visioning.
I'm using grunt-init to build a template for a site structure I repeat regularly.
The template.js file uses the init.copyAndProcess function to customize most of files but a few of them get corrupted by the file processing (some fonts and image files) and I want to include those files in the 'noProcess' option. If these files all existed in the same directory, I could use the noProcess option as mentioned in the documentation [ See: http://gruntjs.com/project-scaffolding#copying-files ] and pass in a string like and it works:
var files = init.filesToCopy(props);
init.copyAndProcess(files, props, {noProcess: 'app/fonts/**'} );
Unfortunately the files that I need to have no processing performed on are not all in the same directory and I'd like to be able to pass in an array of them, something like the following block of code, but this does not work.
var files = init.filesToCopy(props);
init.copyAndProcess(files, props, {noProcess: ['app/fonts/**', 'app/images/*.png', 'app/images/*.jpg']} );
Any thoughts on how I can have multiple targets for the 'noProcess' option?
As soon as I posted the question, I realized that my proposed code did work. I simply had an invalid path when I'd renamed my 'app' directory to 'dev'.
Looking for a build-time CSS combiner/minifier that respects relative URL references.
That is, if one of the files I am combining is at
/path/to/style.css
and contains
background-image: url(images/my-image.png)
the resulting file should contain
background-image: url(/path/to/images/my-image.png).
Should work cross-platform Mac and PC, so either .NET via Mono or Node seem like obvious choices.
Check out WebAssets / Github
Asset management application for Python web development - use it to
merge and compress your JavaScript and CSS files.
It includes filters/ precompiles for cssmin, cssutils, yui_css, less, sass, clevercss, compass, scss, coffeescript, gzip, etc.
Specific to your question:
cssrewrite Source filter that rewrites relative urls in CSS files.
CSS allows you to specify urls relative to the location of the CSS
file. However, you may want to store your compressed assets in a
different place than source files, or merge source files from
different locations. This would then break these relative CSS
references, since the base URL changed.
This filter transparently rewrites CSS url() instructions in the
source files to make them relative to the location of the output path.
It works as a source filter, i.e. it is applied individually to each
source file before they are merged.
No configuration is necessary.
The filter also supports a manual mode:
get_filter('cssrewrite', replace={'old_directory', '/custom/path/'})
This will rewrite all urls that point to files within old_directory to use /custom/path as a prefix instead.
General Usage:
from webassets import Environment
my_env = Environment('../static/media', '/media')
""""As you can see, the environment requires two arguments,
the path in which your media files are located, as well as
the url prefix under which the media directory is available.
This prefix will be used when generating output urls. Next,
you need to define your assets, in the form of so called
bundles, and register them with the environment. The easiest
way to do it is directly in code:""""
from webassets import Bundle
js = Bundle('common/jquery.js', 'site/base.js', 'site/widgets.js', filters='jsmin', output='gen/packed.js')
my_env.register('js_all', js)
In this case you'll replace your js src with output.
Here is an alternate notation:
directory: ../static
url: /media
debug: True
updater: timestamp
bundles:
bundle-name:
filters: sass,cssutils
output: cache/default.css
contents:
- css/jquery.ui.calendar.css
- css/jquery.ui.slider.css
Also has special hooks for Django, Flask, Jinja2, Werkzeug..
Documentation is here. Hope this helps!
Here's a basic Python script that will combine all CSS files in a directory and replace references to your images folder:
import os
import fnmatch
output_text = ''
for filename in os.listdir('.'):
if fnmatch.fnmatch(filename, '*.css'):
output_text += open(filename, 'r').read()
output_text = output_text.replace('url(images', 'url(/path/to/images'))
f = open('combined.css', 'w')
f.write(output_text)
f.close()
This is off the top of my head and hasn't been tested, so it might contain errors.
In response to your comment:
Alternatively, you could use server-side CSS, like SASS/Compass or LESS.
With SASS/Compass you can dynamically change the path to assets (images) using the config.rb file, or from the command-line. You can toggle between relative and absolute paths easily in the same way. Your stylesheets are automatically compressed. To make sure that your files are combined, you can just create a master.scss file and #import each file. Most of my experience is with SASS but I believe LESS has similar features.
This is probably not ideal, however. It would be much simpler, portable, and more efficient to take care of this in a Python/Ruby script. It wouldn't take much effort to expand on the Python script above to make it compress the output file and match all relative paths. Then you can make it automatically run by having something like Foreman watching the build directory for changes.