Last Updated on March 14, 2019 by admin
I’m working on a project that is using the latest Rails markup buzz, namely Compass, SASS and HAML, so it’s time to begin the learning process. Part of that effort will be to convert my personal Rails project over to Compass et. al.
I found that the best approach seems to be to install all the required gems manually before doing anything else. That is:
gem sources --add http://gems.github.com/ sudo gem install haml sudo gem install chriseppstein-compass sudo gem install chriseppstein-compass-960-plugin
Installing HAML also installs SASS, which is pretty convenient. Then install the basic compass gem. Compass supports a few standard stylesheet frameworks: 960gs, blueprint and YUI. I’m using 960.
For Rails integration, you can either build a new Rails project, or you can choose to update an existing project. I tried both commands:
rails <myrailsappnamehere> -m http://www.compass-style.org/rails/installer rake rails:template LOCATION=http://www.compass-style.org/rails/installer
These commands use the Rails 2.3 template facility. The first command creates a totally new Rails directory structure, and this worked as advertised. The second command updates an existing Rails project (you run the command from RAILS_HOME). The upgrade template would hang during the haml --rails . command. Eventually it worked, and to be honest I don’t know what the problem was. But pre-installing the required gems seemed to help. This could also be some kind of quirk associated with using a Fedora Core 8 OS that is beginning to rust out.
I did the installation for both Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9.1, as I’ll be developing in both environments. Note that I have completed the installations, but I haven’t started working with the new gems, so I can’t comment on the quality of the code yet, not that I’m worried.