Sass is great as it adds some neat functionality to your stylesheets, e.g. nesting, mixins, variables and math. Since it is a command line tool you can execute it like
sass --watch input.scss:output.cssHaving to type this command is tedious and creating a .sh or .bat script for this requires you to maintain two files. My approach is to create a custom django-admin command watchsass for this. How this is generally done can be read on this page. The following listing shows the command which I’m using in a small project right now.
#/usr/bin/env python2.6
# Copyright 2011 Ben Ripkens
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
# http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
__authors__ = [
'"Ben Ripkens" <bripkens.dev@gmail.com>',
]
from django.core.management.base import NoArgsCommand
import os
import time
import datetime
class Command(NoArgsCommand):
"""
Watch for changes in the common.scss file and convert it to common.css
using sass. Sass needs to be on the path.
http://sass-lang.com/
"""
help = 'Convert scss to css'
def handle_noargs(self, **options):
scss = os.path.abspath("media/css/common.scss")
css = os.path.abspath("media/css/common.css")
command = "sass \"" + scss + "\":\"" + css + "\" --style compressed"
print "Executing command '%s'" % command
print "Sass watch parameter is not used due to some bug."
last_update = os.stat(scss).st_mtime
os.system(command)
while True:
if not last_update == os.stat(scss).st_mtime:
os.system(command)
last_update = os.stat(scss).st_mtime
print "Updated stylesheet at %s" % datetime.datetime.now()
time.sleep(0.5)As you can see I’m not using the –watch flag. This is because it’s not working on my system.