Making SASS less of a hassle on read only filesystems. (like Heroku)

IMPORTANT: This is for rails 3. If you want hassle for rails 2, then you should use the original one

Get it from Gemcutter.

gem install hassle -s http://gemcutter.org

By default, SASS compiles CSS into the public/ directory. On platforms like Heroku, this won’t work. Instead, Hassle compiles the SASS for you into tmp/ and serves it up via a Rack::Static middleware.

Hassle assumes a few basic things about your setup: There’s going to be a tmp/ directory where it can write to, and public/ is where you store your css. A simple example:

$ tree
.
|-- config.ru
|-- public
|   `-- stylesheets
|       `-- sass
|           `-- application.sass
`-- tmp
    `-- hassle
        `-- stylesheets
            `-- application.css

With a basic SASS file in public/stylesheets/sass/application.sass, you can include it in your views with:

<link href="/stylesheets/application.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Hassle will look at the default sass directory (public/stylesheets/sass) and other input directories given in Sass::Plugin.options[:template_location]. CSS files are then compiled into tmp/ one directory higher than where you specified. Here’s a small example of customization:

Sass::Plugin.options[:template_location] = "./public/css/templates"

And after Hassle runs…

$ tree
.
|-- config.ru
|-- public
|   `-- css
|       `-- templates
|           `-- screen.sass
`-- tmp
    `-- hassle
        `-- css
            `-- screen.css

Include this in your views with:

<link href="/css/screen.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Here’s how to integrate it with your favorite web framework:

For Rails: script/plugin install git://github.com/pedro/hassle. Done. Once you’re in production mode, Hassle will kick in and prepare your SASS for all to enjoy.

Here’s a sample config.ru that’s up and running.

require 'sinatra'
require 'hassle'
require 'haml'

get '/' do
  haml <<EOF
%html
  %head
    %link{:rel => 'stylesheet', :href => "stylesheets/application.css"}
  %body
    %h1 Hassle!
EOF
end

use Hassle
run Sinatra::Application

And its wonderful SASS file:

$ cat public/stylesheets/sass/application.sass 
h1
  font-size: 11em
  color: purple

Found some problems? Post ’em in Issues.

Hassle uses the MIT license. Please check the LICENSE file for more details.