evolve build/deploy process for SCSS

[chadwhitacre]

@nicksergeant is building out #516 using SCSS. @clone1018 raises the point that this means we'll need to evolve our build and deploy systems accordingly.

[nicksergeant]

@whit537 what's your current build process look like?

[chadwhitacre]

@nicksergeant We have a Makefile, but we're looking to port to a Python-based build system to better support Windows (#426).

[chadwhitacre]

@nicksergeant And then for deployment I use release.sh.

[nicksergeant]

Cool - if you're looking to move to Python, check out Fabric: http://fabfile.org

[chadwhitacre]

Word.

[nicksergeant]

At any rate, your compilation process needs to simply make a call to the scss program like so:

scss -t compressed path/to/css/file.scss path/to/output/css/file.css

The scss program can be installed like so:

http://sass-lang.com/download.html

[nicksergeant]

(the scss program will be installed along with sass)

[pjz]

So I did some prototyping that used aspen and fabricate ( https://code.google.com/p/fabricate/ ) to auto-re-compile files as necessary. It's not rocket science; you just make a simplate that has the build recipe for that one file in it as the 'every' action of the simplate, then either manually set the reply body or use a template engine passthrough to return the result.

[chadwhitacre]

@pjz Mind posting it as a gist?

[pjz]

The bottom of https://gist.github.com/pjz/4159060 is what I was toying with.

[pjz]

but https://gist.github.com/pjz/4737190 would be simpler. (untested)

[chadwhitacre]

This is great, @pjz, thanks. !m

Right now I've been using watch -n1 scss -t compressed in out, but that's inefficient and clunky. I believe there are some js autoreloading tools for this, but this solution integrates nicely with our current setup. We should do this in a way that doesn't require scss in production, of course.