Sass or Compass without ruby?

Question

Is there a way to use Sass or Compass or anything like that without Ruby?

I have been looking around google and this site and can't find anything, any help would be appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

Sass was originally written for Ruby, but now they've created libSass which is a C/C++ port of the Sass engine, which makes it easier to integrate the engine into an IDE or another language. At this point, you can use the Sass engine in Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, .NET and others. For more information, visit libSass. Also, your IDE might have a plugin which would support Sass, without the need of ruby by using the libSass.

The original answer below may or may not apply to your situation (depends on whether or not your language has implemented support for libSass or not). I decided to leave it the way it is for archive reasons.

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Sass (requires Ruby)

Sass is written in Ruby, so you’ll need Ruby installed as well. Taken from sass's site

Compass (requires Ruby, as it's based on SASS)

Compass is an open-source CSS authoring framework which uses the Sass stylesheet language to make writing stylesheets powerful and easy. Taken from compass's site

Less (written in js, requires node.js or less.js included in the page)

LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js and Rhino. Taken from Less's site

These are the main processors out there that I know of. You may write your own parser/port for any another language of choice.

In other words, no you can't use sass/compass without having Ruby because the program itself (sass & compass) IS written in Ruby. So you'll definitely need it in order to run it.

Answer 2

Actually there is a library that provides binding for Node.js to libsass, the C version of the Sass: https://npmjs.org/package/node-sass

It allows you to natively compile .scss files to css at incredible speed without Ruby installed.

To install just run:

npm install node-sass

And there is also a Grunt extension if needed: https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-sass (this is what I've been looking for in this question)

Find out more at: https://github.com/andrew/node-sass

Answer 3

It's true that the question is not clear enough, but i'll try to address some issues. There are other CSS pre-processors that don't rely on Ruby (two coming to my mind right now are Less, which i've used and liked, but not as powerful as Sass, and Stylus, which i haven't used, both based on JavaScript), but as you're specifically asking about Sass+Compass, and as i'm still looking for the same answer, i'll talk about that.

@JamundFerguson said:

Is there a way to compile Sass without Ruby? Depends.

There is

Sass is a pre-processing language. There's a compiler built in Ruby for it and anyone can write a compiler in any language. There's a C implementation of a Sass compiler called libsass which can be used on any language that allows to import C libs. It's the library used by node-sass, which is a compiler built in Node.js, which I didn't tried yet and don't know how it could work and if it's ready for production use. It may be a question of time for Compass to be ported (maybe you end up doing that?) and so we can have a compiler which doesn't depends on the Ruby gem (currently, there's a node-compass module that does relies on the Ruby gem).

Other languages

So far i've mentioned the possibility for a Node.js compiler, which, as you may know, it's a JavaScript environment, being the language of the web and my language of choice. But you didn't specified which language you would like the compiler to be written into. I think there may be compilers built in many languages, for example, @EricMeyer mentioned a Python compiler. Maybe he's using pyScss? That seems to have built-in support for Compass. But then you need a Python environment. So the thing is: you'll need some environment for a compiler unless you run natively compiled binaries. (Less has less.js which can be included on the page to run client-side and avoid the compiling step, but it's not meant for using it on production.)

Native apps

I've worked for a year with CodeKit, which does very well, compiles Sass/Compass, Less, Stylus and template languages like Haml, Slim, Jade, etc. Rebuilds your assets when they change automatically and you see the changed on your browser immediately. The only thing that i didn't liked was that when moving to a different computer, installing CodeKit, checking out project and trying to use it, i had to reconfigure the project settings, which i had to remember so i could get to a build like the one i made in the other computer. Also i started working with a team, and they had also to configure the project with the same settings (sometimes not having the same project config lead to ugly inconsistencies) and also members of the team using Ubuntu couldn't use it. That's why i started to think on making a command-line tool to build projects and discovered Grunt immediately, and fell in love with it. As @Dave mentioned, there's Scout and also there's LiveReload, but haven't used them.

Conclusion

Conclusion is i have not a strong conclusion. I'm still looking for the same answer, but i hope this answer sheds a little bit of light on the status of compiling Sass/Compass outside of the Ruby environment.