Question

Rails 3.0.9.

In Gemfile:

gem 'compass-rails' (1.0.1)
gem 'sass' (3.0.19)
...

group :development, :test do
  gem 'guard' (1.0.3)
  gem 'guard-sass' (0.6.0)
  ...
end

In this configuration the error is:

ERROR: Sass > Syntax error: File to import not found or unreadable: compass.
              Load paths:
                /var/www/inbox/public
                /var/www/inbox/public/images
                /var/www/inbox/public/images/intro
                ...

(generally I can see that the path to compass is missing (i.e. ...ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/compass-0.12.1/frameworks/compass/stylesheets is not there), so somehow compass is not being loaded and I don’t know what to do to make it load.

When I trade guard-sass for guard-compass the error is:

ERROR: Rails.root is nil! (RuntimeError)
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/util.rb:370:in `rails_root'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin/rails.rb:11:in `default_options'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin/configuration.rb:33:in `options'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb:38:in `initialize'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin.rb:63:in `new'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin.rb:63:in `compiler'
/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194-perf/gems/sass-3.1.19/lib/sass/plugin.rb:120:in `options'
...

I want this for guard-livereload to work properly whenever I update a .sass file.

Note, that normally compass works properly. Upon page refresh new CSS is being generated from SASS files.

Answer 1

This happens because guard-sass hardcodes SASS import paths only to subdirectories of the current directory (see https://github.com/hawx/guard-sass/blob/ac65c06fb0ea237713197730196d30ac47840bbf/lib/guard/sass.rb#L20 in the latest version 0.6.0) thus importing SASS from Compass is impossible (compass paths are not in the load paths of SASS).

The workaround for that is to override the :load_paths setting. Here’s how I do it:

  guard 'sass', 
    :input => 'app/assets/stylesheets', 
    :output => 'public/stylesheets', 
    :load_paths => Dir.glob(File.join(Gem.dir, "gems", "compass*", "frameworks/blueprint/stylesheets")) + Dir.glob(File.join(Gem.dir, "gems", "compass*", "frameworks/compass/stylesheets"))

Or just upgrade to version 0.7+, where the above should be no longer necessary.