So basically all you need in order to work with dotless on a Mac is Mono. Sounds easily and it actually should be but there were a few architectural issues that prevented me from getting it installed in MacPorts as well as in homebrew. So, first I tried it with MacPorts, got frustrated, deleted MacPorts, accidentally deleted a whole bunch of still usable databases with it and then installed homebrew just to notice that there isn't a formula for Mono in there and compiling it manually with glib etc. provided by homebrew doesn't work either ...
So after fixing all my virtualenvs and scripts that still pointed to /opt/local/bin, I simply went over to mono-project.com to get a binary package (boring).
Once Mono is installed, getting dotless to work is actually a non-issue. It
just works right away as far as I can tell. I just ran a couple of test cases
provided in the source package and wrote a rather minimal example :-) Again, I
was a bit lazy and just got one of the binary packages from their download
archive.
After downloading and extracting the zip you get a dotless.Compiler.exe
which lets you compile .less files into .css files etc. I usually place 3rd
party apps somewhere in my ~/.local folder.
$ cd $DOWNLOAD_DIR
$ mkdir dotless && cd dotless
$ unzip ../dotless-*.zip && cd ..
$ mv dotless ~/.local
Since .exe files are not easily executable under OSX as they are under Windows or with some binfmt magic under Linux, I also wrote a little wrapper script:
#!/bin/bash
exec /usr/bin/mono ~/.local/dotless/dotless.Compiler.exe $@
But, hey! I can't really make installing Mono any easier for you than installing the official package, but at least I can provide a homebrew formula ;-)
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