More

LESS on Rails.

More is a plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. It automatically parses your applications .less files through LESS and outputs CSS files.

In details, More does the following:

• Recursively looks for LESS (.less) files in app/stylesheets
• Ignores partials (prefixed with underscore: _partial.less) - these can be included with @import in your LESS files
• Saves the resulting CSS files to public/stylesheets using the same directory structure as app/stylesheets

LESS

LESS extends CSS with: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. For more information, see https://lesscss.org.

Upgrading from less-for-rails

The old less-for-rails plugin looked for .less files in public/stylesheets. This plugin looks in app/stylesheets.

To migrate, you can either set Less::More.source_path = Rails.root + "/public/stylesheets", or move your .less files to app/stylesheets.

Installation

More depends on the LESS gem. Please install LESS first:

$ gem install less

Rails Plugin

Use this to install as a plugin in a Ruby on Rails app:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/cloudhead/more.git

Rails Plugin (using git submodules)

Use this if you prefer to use git submodules for plugins:

$ git submodule add git://github.com/cloudhead/more.git vendor/plugins/more
$ script/runner vendor/plugins/more/install.rb

Usage

Upon installation, a new directory will be created in app/stylesheets. Any LESS file placed in this directory, including subdirectories, will automatically be parsed through LESS and saved as a corresponding CSS file in public/stylesheets. Example:

app/stylesheets/clients/screen.less => public/stylesheets/clients/screen.css

If you prefix a file with an underscore, it is considered to be a partial, and will not be parsed unless included in another file. Example:

<file: app/stylesheets/clients/partials/_form.less>
@text_dark: #222;
<file: app/stylesheets/clients/screen.less>
@import "partials/_form";
input { color: @text_dark; }

The example above will result in a single CSS file in public/stylesheets/clients/screen.css.

Any .css file placed in app/stylesheets will be copied into public/stylesheets without being parsed through LESS.

Configuration

To set the source path (the location of your LESS files):

Less::More.source_path = "/path/to/less/files"

You can also set the destination path. Be careful with the formatting here, since this is in fact a route, and not a regular path.

Less::More.destination_path = "css"

More can compress your files by removing extra line breaks. This is enabled by default in the production environment. To change this setting, set:

Less::More.compression = true

More inserts headers in the generated CSS files, letting people know that the file is in fact generated and shouldn't be edited directly. This is by default only enabled in development mode. You can disable this behavior if you want to.

Less::More.header = false

To configure More for a specific environment, add configuration options into the environment file, such as config/environments/development.rb.

If you wish to apply the configuration to all environments, place them in config/environment.rb.

Heroku

The plugin works out-of-the-box on Heroku.

Heroku has a read-only file system, which means caching the generated CSS with page caching is not an option. Heroku supports caching with Varnish, though, which the plugin will leverage by setting Cache-Control headers so that generated CSS is cached for one month.

Tasks

More provides a set of Rake tasks to help manage your CSS files.

To parse all LESS files and save the resulting CSS files to the destination path, run:

$ rake more:parse

To delete all generated CSS files, run:

$ rake more:clean

This task will not delete any CSS files from the destination path, that does not have a corresponding LESS file in the source path.

Git

If you are using git to version control your code and LESS for all your stylesheets, you can add this entry to your .gitignore file:

public/stylesheets

Documentation

To view the full RDoc documentation, go to https://rdoc.info/projects/cloudhead/more

Contributors

• August Lilleaas (https://github.com/augustl)
• Logan Raarup (https://github.com/logandk)

LESS is maintained by Alexis Sellier https://github.com/cloudhead