How to enable sass caching? / Change sass options in middlemanapp

#1

I am working on a project with complex scss consisting of multiple files and the refresh times in livereload take a long time.

It seems that in MIddleman caching is disabled for sass by default – I don’t see a .sass-cache folder anywhere. I believe that enabling it will speed up the compilation of scss dramatically. How can I re-enable this option?

Something like

sass_options = { cache: true }

I guess I am not sure how to access the sass options in Middlemanapp … how can I do this?

#2

The Sass cache used to be enabled by default but was deliberately disabled in v3.3.0.

If you understand the consequences (I don’t) you can reenable it via Compass:

compass_config do |config|
  config.cache = true
end
#3

I added this to the config file but unfortunately nothing changed. I also tried adding a cache directory manually to no avail.

compass_config do |config|
  config.cache_path      = "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/.sass-cache/"
  config.cache = true
end

Any idea how to approach this?

#4

Hmm, I don’t understand why that doesn’t work. You might have to ping tdreyno for an explanation.

#5

@tdreyno do you see a possible solution to this?

#6

I think Sprockets is hijacking this and using it’s own cache instead. We are using an in-memory cache for Sprockets, it isn’t going to be on disk.

That all said, your problems probably aren’t in caching. Rather, Ruby Sass and Compass have some really gnarly file I/O problems. Lots of dependencies which cross reference each other or import large sets of imports (like @import "compass";) cause it to go into very nasty loops. I’ve seen 1+ minute build times all spent in file discovery :frowning:

For my projects, I personally avoid Compass and use autoprefixer instead. Hopefully LibSass in Ruby will stabilize soon and we could possibly switch to that as well.

#7

Doesn’t middleman use compass to compile the files?

How can I remove the dependency?

I already use autoprefixer and could easily include sass-mixins if I needed more.

#8

Added compass-mixins]1 to the css folder, removed compass from the Gemfile and now everything is a little snappier.