Django LESS

Django LESS provides template tags to compile LESS into CSS from templates. It works with both inline code and extenal files.

Installation

Add "less" to INSTALLED_APPS setting.
Make sure that you have lessc executable installed. See LESS official site for details.
Optionally, you can specify the full path to lessc executable with LESS_EXECUTABLE setting. By default it's set to lessc.

Example Usage

Inline

{% load less %}

<style>
  {% inlineless %}
    #header {
      h1 {
        font-size: 26px;
        font-weight: bold;
      }
      p { font-size: 12px;
        a { text-decoration: none;
          &:hover { border-width: 1px }
        }
      }
    }
  {% endless %}
</style>

renders to

<style>
  #header h1 {
    font-size: 26px;
    font-weight: bold;
  }
  #header p {
    font-size: 12px;
  }
  #header p a {
    text-decoration: none;
  }
  #header p a:hover {
    border-width: 1px;
  }
</style>

External file

{% load less %}

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ STATIC_URL}}{% less "path/to/styles.less" %}" />

renders to

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/LESS_CACHE/path/to/styles-91ce1f66f583.css" />

Note that by default compiled files are saved into LESS_CACHE folder under your STATIC_ROOT (or MEDIA_ROOT if you have no STATIC_ROOT in your settings). You can change this folder name with LESS_OUTPUT_DIR setting.

Note that all relative URLs in your stylesheet are converted to absolute URLs using your STATIC_URL setting.

Settings

LESS_EXECUTABLE: Path to LESS compiler executable. Default: "lessc".
LESS_OUTPUT_DIR: Output directory for compiled external stylesheets. It's relative to STATIC_ROOT. Default: "LESS_CACHE".
LESS_USE_CACHE: Whether to use cache for inline styles. Default: True.
LESS_CACHE_TIMEOUT: Cache timeout for inline styles (in seconds). Default: 30 days.
LESS_MTIME_DELAY: Cache timeout for reading the modification time of external stylesheets (in seconds). Default: 10 seconds.
LESS_STATIC_ROOT: Directory where we should look for the less files. defaults to STATIC_ROOT or MEDIA_ROOT
LESS_OUTPUT_URI: URI to use with the converted files
LESS_FORCE_REGENERATE: Force the regeneration of the css with each request, useful for the designers if they use imports
LESS_USE_URL_CONVERTER: Set it to False if you do not want to have your urls

Another usage case

this is how I use this when using Mustache instead of standard Django templates. Just add this somewhere in the in your view, so that it ends up in your view's context

from less.templatetags.less import less
context['less_generated_css'] = less('custom.less')

EstebanMDQ / django-less