grunt-less-imports

A grunt task to create LessCSS @import statements from a collection of stylesheet files.

@import (once) "filename"; // <-- these. in a file. automatically.

Why use this? To get useful error messages from the LessCSS parser, that tell you in what file the error was encountered! LessCSS uses @import statements to aggregate files and will tell you about parsing errors in those files. But maintaining these statements by hand is a pain. In order to automatically aggregate all the style files in a project, a method of first concatenating the files before parsing is widely used. This works but you loose the valuable information about where to fix your mistakes.

So, automate @import creation with this plugin and use the resulting file as the source for the LessCSS parser.

By default any .css source files are inlined in the generated file before the @import statements.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ^0.4.5.

Alternatively grunty allows to any grunt plugin as NPM script without Gruntfile.js

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-less-imports --save-dev

--save-dev adds the plugin to your devDependencies.

Once the plugin has been installed, load it in your Gruntfile.js like so:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-less-imports');

The "less_imports" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named less_imports to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
	less_imports: {
		options: {
			// Task-specific options go here.
		},
		your_target: {
			// Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
		}
	}
})

Options

• options.inlineCSS {Boolean} true
  By default any .css source files are inlined in the output before the @import statements for the less files start. LessCSS itself will generate CSS from .less @import statements, but any .css @imports are left as is. If that's the behavior you want, set inlineCSS to false. The @imports will be created in order of the provided files.

• options.banner {String} "// This file was generated by grunt-less-imports"
  This option contains the banner that is added to the beginning of the generated output file.

• options.import {String|Function} "once"
  Set Less import option keyword.
  String: Set the keyword for all @import statements in the task target.
  Function: Dynamically set the @import keyword with a callback. The path and extension of the current file are passed as arguments. The function must return a string.

Examples

Basic example with options

grunt.initConfig({
	less_imports: {
		options: {
			inlineCSS: false, // default: true
			import: 'reference' // default: once
		},
		src: [ 'styles/*.css', 'styles/*.less'],
		dest: 'temp/imports.less'
	}
})

More Examples

Using 'files' shorthand notation

In this example, a files shorthand is used to specify input files and the output file instead of src and dest.

grunt.initConfig({
	less_imports: {
		options: {
		},
		files: {
			'dist/imports.less': ['styles/styles.css', 'styles/styles.less']
		}
	}
})

Using multiple task targets

grunt.initConfig({
	less_imports: {
		options: { // general task options
			inlineCSS: false
		},
		project: {
			src: [ 'styles/*.css', 'styles/*.less'],
			dest: 'dist/project.less'
		},
		vendor: {
			options: { // target-specific options
				import: 'reference'
			},
			src: [ 'styles/vendor/*.css', 'styles/vendor/*.less'],
			dest: 'dist/vendor.less'
		}
	}
})

Example with a options.import callback

grunt.initConfig({
	less_imports: {
		options: {
			import: function(filepath, extension) {
				if (filepath === 'styles/helpers.less')
					return 'reference';
				else
					return 'once';
			}
		},
		src: [ 'styles/*.css', 'styles/*.less'],
		dest: 'temp/imports.less'
	}
})

Troubleshooting

Run the task with the debug and verbose options. This will give you a lot of info about what's going on.

grunt less_imports --debug --verbose

To just run a specific task target

grunt less_imports:target-name --debug --verbose

Debug will make grunt-less-imports print out more info, and verbose is used by grunt to be, well, really quite verbose.

Contributing

• Clone the project from https://github.com/MarcDiethelm/grunt-less-imports.git
• npm install (no global dependencies required)
• npm test

How to contribute to a project on Github

Release History

see CHANGELOG.md