LibSass Has Reached End-Of-Life

LibSass and the packages built on top of it have been deprecated since October 2020. In the five years since we made that announcement, the Sass language has continued to evolve to support the latest CSS features like color spaces, and embedded sass made it easy to run Dart Sass across numerous different languages and platforms.^[1] Dart Sass now meets essentially all the use-cases that LibSass once did.

At the same time, development of LibSass has faltered. There hasn’t been a new commit to the source code repository since December 2023, and there are numerous issues languishing unaddressed. The time has come to be clear: LibSass is no longer maintained and will receive no future updates.

Migrating AwayMigrating Away permalink

As they say, the best time to migrate away from LibSass was five years ago, but the second best time is now. There is a large and growing list of incompatibilities between it and Dart Sass, largely to more correctly support CSS features. You’ll need to make sure your stylesheets are building without deprecation warnings and then do some visual checks as well to see if there are any more subtle differences.

The LibSass page contains a summary of the most notable incompatibilities, which may be helpful in knowing what to look for. Some of them also have automated migrations available using the Sass migrator.

Thanks AgainThanks Again permalink

I already mentioned this in the deprecation blog post, but thanks to everyone who made LibSass happen. It was a crucial stepping stone to bring Sass outside the Ruby bubble at a time when it was no longer the center of the web development world, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Sass is still the world’s most popular stylesheet preprocessor because of LibSass. But all things that rise must also fall, and this project’s time has come.