Dead Simple LESS CSS Watch Compiler

A command that watches folders(and subfolders) for file changes and automatically compile the less css files into css. This is a file system watcher and compiler.

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"],
    "minified": false,
    "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, "minified" is turned on to always compress/minify output. You can set the minification to false by adding "minified":false in the config file.
• 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/deadsimple-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)