Guard::Less

A guard extension that compiles .less files to .css files when changed.

Compatible with Less ~> 2.3.
Tested against Ruby 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, Rubinius & JRuby (1.9 mode only).

Install

You will need to have Guard first.

Install the gem with:

gem install guard-less

Add an initial setup to your Guardfile with:

guard init less

Please note that you also have to install therubyracer (or therubyrhino when you are running JRuby).

Usage

Please read Guard usage doc.

Guardfile

less_options = {
  all_on_start: true,
  all_after_change: true,
  patterns: [/^.+\.less$/],
  output: 'public/stylesheets'
}

guard :less, less_options do
  less_options[:patterns].each { |pattern| watch(pattern) }
end

Please read Guard doc for more info about Guardfile DSL.

Options

all_after_change: [true|false]   # run on all files after any changed files
                                    # default: true

all_on_start: [true|false]       # run on all the files at startup
                                    # default: true

output: 'relative/path'          # base directory for output CSS files; if unset,
                                    # .css files are generated in the same directories
                                    # as their corresponding .less file
                                    # default: nil

import_paths: ['lib/styles']     # an array of additional load paths to pass to the
                                 # LESS parser, used when resolving `@import`
                                 # statements
                                 # default: [] (see below)

compress: true                   # minify output

yuicompress: true                # minify output using yui

patterns: []                     # array of patterns for matching watched/processed files

Output option

By default, .css files will be generated in the same directories as their corresponding .less files (partials beginning with _ are always excluded).

To customize the output location, pass the :output option as described above, and be sure to use a match group in the regular expression in your watch to capture nested structure that will be preserved, i.e.

less_options = {
  all_on_start: true,
  all_after_change: true,
  patterns: [/^app/stylesheets/(.+\.less)$/],
  output: 'public/stylesheets'
}

guard :less, less_options do
  less_options[:patterns].each { |pattern| watch(pattern) }
end

will result in app/stylesheets/forums/main.less producing CSS at public/stylesheets/forums/main.css.

Import paths option

As each .less file is parsed, the directory containing the file is automatically prepended to the import paths, so imports relative to your watched dirs like @import 'shared/_type-styles' should always work. You can supply additional paths with this option so that, for the ['lib/styles'] example, a file at lib/styles/reset.less could be imported without a qualified path as @import 'reset'.

Author

Brendan Erwin (@brendanjerwin, brendanjerwin.com)

Maintainer

Rémy Coutable

Contributors

https://github.com/guard/guard-less/graphs/contributors

guard-less

Development

Runtime