How to Install and Configure SASS Locally

In this lesson, we'll cover the installation of SASS onto our local machine. Including the initial configuration & live server setup.

We'll cover the following

Before we can write Sass code, it needs to be installed locally. As by default, it’s not a language known to the browser.

Let’s now go through the process to setup the environment that will allow us to write then compile Sass.

Note: When Sass is compiled, it is converted into regular CSS code that browsers can interpret and render.

Environment setup #

Before we start, you must have npm installed on your computer, it comes bundled with Node.js; you can install it from here. Go ahead and install it if you haven’t already.

If you are unsure whether you have Node.js installed or not, run node -v from your terminal.

If you see a version number, it’s installed!

A note on terminal:

If you are new to SASS, chances are you may also be new to running commands from the terminal. It’s not as daunting as it might seem! And it’s a real time-saver once you gain more experience.

To open a terminal on a Windows PC, right-click the Windows Icon and select Windows Powershell, if you’re on a Mac go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

Folder Structure #

Let’s create our project folders! They will be structured like so:

sass-project
   |- sass
   |- css

To create this structure, open terminal and change to the folder you wish to install the sass project into (via the cd command).

Then run the following commands:

mkdir sass-project
cd sass-project
mkdir -p sass css

File Structure #

You will need an index.html and main.scss in this folder.

To create these files, run:

touch index.html
cd sass
touch main.scss
cd ..

You’ll also need a default CSS stylesheet for the SASS to compile into:

cd css
touch style.css

Open up your index.html and paste in the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Index page</title>
    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/style.css”>
  </head>
  <body>

  </body>
</html>

This is just our boilerplate code with the stylesheet connected!

Initializing our Project Directory #

All projects that use npm need to be initialized. To do this, ensure you’re still in the sass-project folder and run the following command:

npm init -y

This will create a package.json file for our project. We’ll be learning more about the configuration of this file later in the course!

Install node-sass

node-sass is the library which allows us to compile .scss to .css.

Run the following command to install node-sass as dev dependency.

npm install node-sass --save-dev

Note: A dev dependency is only used in the build phase of our project. It’s not included at runtime.

Compiling Sass Code to CSS #

Next, we need to create an npm script to run the compilation.

Add this script inside the script section of our previously created package.json file:

"compile-sass": "node-sass sass/main.scss css/style.css"

Don’t forget to separate each script with a comma!

We have here specified main.scss as our main Sass file and style.css as the compiled CSS file.

To compile our SASS code into CSS, all we need to do is run:

npm run compile-sass

Live Reload #

Let’s also add a live reload to our project! To do this run the following to install globally:

npm install live-server -g

Now, make sure you’re still in the Sass project folder, and run:

live-server

And just like that, you’ve got a pretty neat dev environment with your project running locally on HTTP.

You’ll need to keep live-server and npm run compile-sass running in two separate terminal windows.

So we now have the project environment all set up on the local machine!

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