How to automatically compile LESS into CSS on the server?

Question

Friend designer of mine was compiling his LESS file manually and uploading it with Coda (Remote Site) spending lots of precious time. He asked me:

Is it possible to aut

Answer 1

I have modified @romaninsh's solution so that it will recompile when any Less files in the directory are changed. I have also added an echo statement before compiling the Less files, to provide some validation that a change has been detected in case compilation takes a few seconds.

/usr/local/bin/lesscwatch:

#!/bin/bash                                                                     
# Detect changes in .less file and automatically compile into .css                 
[ "$2" ] || { echo "Specify both .less and .css files"; exit 1; }                  
inotifywait . -m -e close_write | while read x op f; do                            
    if [[ "$f" == *".less" ]]; then                                                
        echo "Change detected. Recompiling...";                                    
        lessc $1 > $2 && echo "`date`: COMPILED";                                                                                                                           
    fi                                                                             
done 

This more closely mimics the behaviour of Less.app for Mac that I am used to.

When developing with Less, I usually have a bunch of files in the /style directory of my project and compile everything down into a single .css file using overrides.

Usage example:

base.less:

@import "overrides.less";
@import "variables.less";

body {
   ...
}

The usage is the same as

lesscwatch base.less base.css