precssious

This is just a hack to allow me to write nested CSS. I had trouble finding a CSS preprocessor that actually allowed nested styles without breaking my stylesheets.

Although I am under no illusions of the general applicability of this code (the current implementation is very naïve), it appears to do OK with how I write CSS.

See spec/snippets.rb for a quick list of the features it supports.

On performance / configuration

It’s probably not a good idea to serve stylesheets using precssious under normal conditions. However, caching them in development can be a real drag. I’ve used the following approach.

(1) I add a precssious dependency, and make sure it isn’t loaded by default.

/config/environment.rb

config.gem 'precssious', :lib => false

(2) I add an initializer with the following code, to load precssious in development:

/config/initializers/precssious.rb

if RAILS_ENV == 'development'
  require 'precssious'
  Precssious.start_rails_controller
end

This catches requests to “/stylesheets/xxx/xxx.css”, and serves the content of all stylesheets in that directory, merged into a single file. The web path (“stylesheets”) and the source directory (“public/stylesheets”) can both be configured.

(3) For production, I don’t want Precssious loaded at all – instead, I generate the stylesheets on deploy:

/lib/tasks/precssious.rake

desc 'Generates the stylesheets as static resources'
task :precssious do
  require 'precssious'
  Precssious.perform_preprocessing
end

/config/deploy.rb

after "deploy:update_code" do
  run "cd #{current_path} && rake precssious"
end

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but
```
bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
```
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

precssious

On performance / configuration

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Copyright