LESS

Overview

LESS (lesscss.org) extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. It's an advanced way of writing CSS that we use in some themes within Moodle.

Browsers don't interpret it themselves, however, so LESS files need to be converted into normal CSS before use.

Recess is one tool used to compile and compress LESS into CSS under *nix based systems. There are many others tools for LESS.

The bootstrapbase theme

Moodle's Bootstrap base theme has rules written using LESS.

The main LESS file is theme/bootstrapbase/less/moodle.less, with additional files in theme/bootstrapbase/less/moodle/ imported by the main file.

After compiling the LESS files, CSS ends up in theme/bootstrapbase/style/moodle.css. This file should not be edited manually.

Compilers

Recess

Installing Recess under Ubuntu

The following commands should be run to install Recess

1. sudo apt-get install npm node
   (if the above fails due to the error "The following packages have unmet dependencies", run the commands separately, ie. sudo apt-get install npm and then sudo apt-get install node)
2. npm install recess -g

npm stands for Node Package Manager, and is the equivalent of apt-get for node.js packages.

Installing Recess on Mac OS X

1. Install the basic node packages from the web site: http://nodejs.org (or use your favourite package manager to install node and npm).

2. On the command line, install recess like this:

    npm install recess -g

Installing Recess under Windows7

In order to install Recess you need to have Node.js installed first, which is relatively simple to do.

Install Node.js

These instructions are for Windows 7 64 bit.

Go to nodejs.org click install.

When installed go to -> Start -> All Programs -> type Node.js into the Search box, then select Node.js Command prompt (black icon) from the list. Now you are ready to install Recess. So at the command line prompt type the following:

 npm install recess -g

npm stands for Node Package Manager, and is the equivalent of apt-get for node.js packages.

Using Recess

After editing the LESS files, compile your CSS as follows:

cd theme/bootstrapbase/less/
recess --compile --compress moodle.less > ../style/moodle.css

This will compile and compress the moodle.less file (and all the LESS and CSS files it imports) into a single file, moodle.css, and store it in the style folder of the bootstrapbase theme.

NOTE: if you are getting empty moodle.css files, this is being caused by a parsing error in your LESS code. A bug in recess currently prevents it giving you helpful error messages in many cases. You will need to examine what you have altered or written to make sure it is complete and the syntax is correct. The lessc compiler is what is used by recess to do the actual compiling and will have been installed automatically along with it. If you call it directly as lessc moodle.less it should give you a helpful error message that points you to where the problem is.