Nicss

(pronounced like nice)

Nicss is a css helper library that extracts exported stylesheets out of node_modules and symlinks them into a single styles/ folder. This makes it easier to include the stylesheets of dependencies with css post-processors.

How it works

As an unofficial standard, many popular packages are adding a style field to their package.json file that links to their compiled css. Nicss crawls through your dependency graph and finds packages with this style property and symlinks each compiled css file to a single styles/ folder.

Here's an example project:

.
├── node_modules
│   ├── one
│   │   ├── package.json         // contains `"style": "./one-styles.css"`
│   │   └── one-styles.css       // contains `.one { color: red; }`
│   └── two
│       ├── package.json         // contains `"style": "./two-styles.css"`
│       └── two-styles.css       // contains `.two { color: blue; }`
├── index.js
└── package.json

When you run nicss, this is what happens:

.
├── node_modules
│   ├── one
│   │   ├── package.json         // contains `"style": "./one-styles.css"`
│   │   └── one-styles.css       // contains `.one { color: red; }`
│   └── two
│       ├── package.json         // contains `"style": "./two-styles.css"`
│       └── two-styles.css       // contains `.two { color: blue; }`
├── index.js
├── package.json
└── styles // nicss creates this folder...
    ├── one.css -> ../node_modules/one/one-styles.css // ... and symlinks each package's stylesheet inside.
    └── two.css -> ../node_modules/two/two-styles.css

Now, any package's defined stylesheet is accessible from within one folder:

$ # ie, cat styles/$PACKAGENAME.css
$ cat styles/one.css
.one { color: red; }
$ cat styles/two.css
.one { color: two; }

This is a format that tools like node-sass (using includePaths) and less (using paths) can easily consume:

// node-sass
// Note: run `nicss --ext scss` to output scss instead of css files for the below to work.
const sass = require('node-sass');
sass.render({
  data: '@import "one";',
  includePaths: ['./styles'],
}, function(err, output) {
  console.log(err, output)
});

// less
const less = require('less');
less.render('@import "one.css";', {
  paths: ['./styles']
}, function (e, output) {
  console.log(err, output);
});

How to use

1. Install Nicss: npm i -S @density/nicss
2. Give it a try manually first: run ./node_modules/.bin/nicss
3. Add a postinstall hook to your package, so that after running npm install, css dependencies are linked for you: "postinstall": "nicss"
4. Done. CSS dependencies will be automatically extracted when you run npm install.

Why not webpack?

Webpack is magic. Magic can be great when it works, but can be confusing and complicated. We've opted to minimize our use of webpack so that we have a deep understanding of our build process.