Question

I use @import‘d partial sheets to organize my css/sass:

/app
  /assets
    /stylesheets
      _constants.sass
      _layout.sass
      ...
      app.css.sass

app.css.sass:
  @import _constants.sass
  // basic styles
  @import _layout.sass
  @import ...

app.css.sass has an @import rule for _layout.sass, which allows me to share mixins and variables amongst the raw sass files before they’re complied down into app.css

The problem is that Rails doesn’t recognize changes to the @import‘d partials (_layout.sass) and won’t regenerate app.css until I make a change to the actual app.css.sass file itself. This dramatically slows down my workflow and means I have to add/remove blank lines from app.css.sass to see changes. Never had this problem in 3.0.

Is there a way of forcing sass assets to regenerate on every server request in development?

Answer 1

Using a depend_on directive may do what you require. This makes the given file a dependency of the base file (so the base file is regenerated when the dependency changes), but doesn’t include it in the bundle.

For example:

/*
*= depend_on _layout.sass
*= depend_on _constants.sass
*/
@import _layout.sass
@import _constants.sass

See this sass and sprockets blog post as well as the sprockets documentation (especially the directives section).