SASS to CSS via an ANT task + directory creation

Question

I recently started playing with SASS [http://sass-lang.com/] in a Java-based project and wanted to create an Ant task that:

• for each .scss file + subdirectories containing .scss files in a top-level scss directory:
  • create the appropriate directory in a main CSS dir
  • compile the .scss file and place the .css file where it belongs

How do I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Original answer by rewinder:

---

It ended up taking me some time to figure it out so I thought I'd post how I accomplished it. Here's my setup:

build.properties

css.dir=./template/ver1-0/css/v3
sass.dir=./template/ver1-0/css/v3/scss

scss directory structure:

/template/ver1-0/css/v3/scss
    + widgets
        - widgettest.scss
        - widgettest2.scss
    + global
        - globaltest.scss
        - globaltest2.css
    - file1.scss
    - file2.scss
    - _partial1.scss
    - _partial2.scss

Here's the Ant task:

<!-- scss to CSS -->
<!-- via: http://workingonthecoolstuff.blogspot.com/2011/02/using-sass-in-ant-build.html -->
<target name="sass-compile-to-css">
    <echo message="Compiling scss files to css..." />
    <!-- create the css destination dir if it doesn't already exist -->
    <property name="css-dest" location="${css.dir}"/>
    <echo message="Creating directory at ${css.dir} [if it doesn't yet exist]" />
    <mkdir dir="${css-dest}" />
    <!-- create subdirs if necessary
        via: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536511/how-to-create-directories-specified-by-a-mapper-in-ant -->
    <echo message="Creating css directories (and temporary .css files) for .scss to be compiled..." />
    <touch mkdirs="true">
        <fileset dir="${sass.dir}" includes="**/*.scss" excludes="**/_*" />
        <mapper type="glob" from="*.scss" to="${css.dir}/*.css"/>
    </touch>
    <echo message="Running sass executable against sass files and compiling to CSS directory [${css-dest}] " />
    <!-- run sass executable -->
    <apply executable="sass" dest="${css-dest}" verbose="true" force="true" failonerror="true">
        <arg value="--unix-newlines" />
        <srcfile />
        <targetfile />
        <fileset dir="${sass.dir}" includes="**/*.scss" excludes="**/_*" />
        <mapper type="glob" from="*.scss" to="*.css"/>
    </apply>
    <echo message="Done compiling scss files!" />
</target>

After running the task the results are as hoped for: .scss files are compiled to the same path that they were created under. If the file parent directory did not yet exist under ${css.dir} then it gets created accordingly.