Dead Simple LESS Watch Compiler

A nodejs script that watches folders(and subfolders) for changes and automatically compile the less css files into css.

Always give credit where it is due. Parts of this script is modified from Mikeal Rogers's watch script (https://github.com/mikeal/watch)

Prerequisites

Install LESS (http://www.lesscss.org/) and make sure the lessc binary is accessible to the script. Installing LESS with the -g(global) flag will make the binary accessible to your system.

(sudo) npm install -g less

Installation

Install the less-watch-compiler command globally.

(sudo) npm install -g less-watch-compiler

Usage

less-watch-compiler FOLDER_TO_WATCH FOLDER_TO_OUTPUT

###Example #1

less-watch-compiler tests/less tests/css

The above command will watch the tests/less folder and compile the LESS CSS files into tests/css folder as soon as they are added/updated.

###Example #2 Add less-watch-compiler.config.json as follows in your project folder

{
    "allowedExtensions":["less"],
    "defaults": {
        "watchFolder": "tests/less",
        "outputFolder": "tests/css"
    }
}

The above will do the same as in example 1. But you can just run the following without passing the folders everytime.

less-watch-compiler

Extras:

• By default, this script only compiles files with .less extension. More file extensions can be added by modifying the allowedExtensions array in config.json.
• Files that start with underscores _style.css or period .style.css are ignored. This behavior can be changed in the filterFiles() function.
• Github location: https://github.com/jonycheung/Dead-Simple-LESS-Watch-Compiler

Using the source files

Alternativelly, you can checkout the code nad run things locally like this:

node less-watch-compiler.js [options]

To run unit tests: npm test (see tests/test.js)