Mick Redman: less

Showing posts with label less. Show all posts

Monday, 6 February 2017

How to install less css on Ubuntu

sudo apt install npm
sudo npm install -g less
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Monday, 21 January 2013

Install and use LESSCSS on your ubuntu server

LESSCSS is an excellent progression in the development of stylesheets, but how do you install and use it on your ubuntu server?
The first thing we do is to install node-less. To do this through the terminal, use the command:
sudo apt-get install node-less
Right, that's the installation done. Yes, that easy.
Now let's create our LESSCSS stylesheet. Here is my simple example, which we'll put into a file named styles.less:

@blue:#00c;
@white:#FFFFFF;
body
{
background:@blue;
color:@white;
}

There are two ways of using LESSCSS.
The first way is to download, the less.js library from http://lesscss.org/, then simply refer to a LESSCSS stylesheet we created and subsequently call the library thus:.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>less test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="styles.less">
<script src="less.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>
The second way is to compile our LESSCSS stylesheet into a normal CSS. To do this, again go to the terminal, change to the directory containing your page e.g.
cd /var/www/test/less
Then compile the LESSCSS stylesheet into a normal CSS like this:
lessc styles.less > mystyle.css
Now you can just call your newly created CSS in your page, but this time without the need for the less.js library thus:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>less test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css">
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>

Friday, 21 January 2011

No I'm not going to title this post less is more

I have started to use less. No, I'm not completely useless. Less from lesscss.org "extends CSS with dynamic behavior such asvariables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (IE 6+, Webkit, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js."

So below is an example of how to get started. First, you need to download less.js from lesscss.org. Let's say that we are going to put this .js file, our HTML file and our css file all in the same folder.

Once downloaded, I tend to rename the file less.js.

We then need to create our stylesheet. Our stylesheet can be named however we like but it must have the .less extension, so let's call it style.less. Once created we'll add the following lines:
@nice-blue: #5B83AD;
@light-blue: @nice-blue + #111;
#header { color: @light-blue; }

You can see from the lines above, that we have created a variable called @nice-blue and assigned it a value of #5B83AD. We have then created another variable called @light-blue and assigned it the value of @nice-blue + #111. We have then assigned the variable colour of @light-blue to the property color for the selector #header, which we will be using in our HTML page.

As you can imagine, once you've declared your variables this way, it's easier to use them over and over again. An this is just the start. You can also use 'mixins' such as two or more css classes being combined into one greater class. You can add 'Parametric Mixins', allowing you to pass parameters to css classes. There is so much more so go to the website and have a look.

We are now about to create our HTML page. At this stage, I should warn you that it's very important what order you declare the stylesheet and the script tag, otherwise it won't work, so please follow the example.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Less example</title>
<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="style.less" />

</head>
<body>
<p id="header">This should now be a nice light blue.</p>
</body>
</html>