dotLess on a Mac

I’m more the sass/compass kind of guy but after having heard so much about doless from Daniel, I thought, I should at least try to get it running on OSX. Infrastructure-wise it sadly doesn’t really fit into my usual projects but it’s always great to have a choice :D Luckily the two are more or less equal feature-wise. That’s sad, scoped variables in (dot)less are really nice ;-)

So let’s get to it …

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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 ;-)