Ruby Sass

Ruby Sass was the original implementation of Sass, but it reached its end of life as of 26 March 2019. It’s no longer supported, and any legacy projects still using Ruby Sass should migrate to Dart Sass.

  • But Why?

    When Natalie and Hampton first created Sass in 2006, Ruby was the language at the cutting edge of web development, the basis of their already-successful Haml templating language, and the language they used most in their day-to-day work. Writing Sass in Ruby made it readily available to their existing users and the whole booming Ruby ecosystem.

    Since then, Node.js has become ubiquitous for frontend tooling while Ruby has faded into the background. At the same time, Sass projects have grown far larger than we initially envisioned them, and their performance needs have outpaced the speed Ruby can provide. Both Dart Sass and LibSass are blazing fast, easy to install, and are readily available on npm. Ruby Sass couldn’t keep up, and it didn’t make sense to spend the core team’s resources on it any longer.

  • Migrating Away

    If you run Ruby Sass using the command-line sass executable, all you need to do is install Dart Sass’s command-line executable instead. The interface isn’t identical, but most options work the same way.

    If you use the sass gem as a library, the sass-embedded gem is the recommended way to move away from Ruby Sass. It bundles the Dart Sass command-line executable, and uses the Embedded Sass Protocol to provide a Ruby API for compiling Sass and defining custom importers and functions. You can also use the dartsass-rails or dartsass-sprockets gem to plug smoothly into Ruby on Rails.

    Alternately, if you’re using a JS build system, you can integrate that with Dart Sass as a JavaScript library.