LESS - Third Party Compilers
Node.js Compilers
Following are the Node.js compilers used for LESS.
Grunt is a Node task runner. It will compile your stylesheets every time you commit changes to your LESS files.
assemble-less is a powerful grunt plugin for compiling LESS file to CSS. The less task pulls JSON and Lo - dash(underscore) template for defining the LESS bundles, UI components, compressed stylesheets or themes.
It is LESS plugin for Gulp. gulp-minify-css is used to minify your CSS. gulp-sourcemaps is used to generate the sourcemaps library.
It is an open-source tool which is built on LESS and helps in optimizing your CSS code. It keeps the CSS code error free, clean and manageable.
It is a .less file watcher. It contains dependency tracking and Cross-platform notification.
It is used to allow the processing for connect JS framework of LESS files. It compiles source file on request and cache the compiled data for next request.
Other Technologies
Following are a few othertechnologies that help you compile a LESS code.
Wro4j Runner CLI
You can download the wro4j-runner.jar and can compile your LESS code in CSS by using the following command −
java -jar wro4j-runner-1.5.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar --preProcessors lessCss
You can visit the following link to know more about Wro4j Runner CLI
CSS::LESSp
This module is used to parse and compile the LESS file into CSS file. Following is the command used to compile −
lessp.pl styles.less > styles.css
You can visit the following link to know more about CSS::LESSp
Windows Script Host
Following is the command line compiler that will run on windows.
cscript //nologo lessc.wsf input.less [output.css] [-compress]
OR
lessc input.less [output.css] [-compress]
You can visit the following link to know more about Less.js for windows
dotless
The following is a command line compiler to run dotless for windows.
dotless.Compiler.exe [-switches] <inputfile> [outputfile]
You can visit the following link to know more about dotless
