Ruby Sass Has Reached End-Of-Life

Posted 4 April 2019 by Natalie Weizenbaum

One year has passed since we announced the deprecation of Ruby Sass, and it has now officially reached its end-of-life. We will release one final version of the Ruby Sass gem that will print a warning indicating that it’s no longer receiving updates, and then archive the GitHub repository.

We will then merge the sass/language repo into the sass/sass repo. This means that anyone still depending on Ruby Sass from github.com/sass/sass will break. Going forward, the sass/sass repo will be the location for working on the language specs, and will not contain any code. The sass/language repo will just include links pointing to sass/sass.

Migrating Away permalinkMigrating Away

If you haven’t migrated away from Ruby Sass yet, now is the time. The best way to do that depends on how you use Ruby Sass today.

If you use Ruby Sass as a command-line tool, the easiest way to migrate is to install Dart Sass as a command-line tool. It supports a similar interface to Ruby Sass, and you can run sass --help for a full explanation of its capabilities.

If you use Ruby Sass as a plugin for a Ruby web app, particularly if you define your own Sass functions in Ruby, the sassc gem provides access to LibSass from Ruby with a very similar API to Ruby Sass. In most cases, you can just replace the Sass module with the SassC module and your code will continue to work.

If you’re using Rails, we particularly recommend using the sassc-rails gem, which wraps up the sassc gem and integrates it smoothly into the asset pipeline. Most of the time you won’t even need to change any of your code.

Farewell, Ruby Sass! permalinkFarewell, Ruby Sass!

On a personal note, I started writing Ruby Sass in 2006 when I was just a college kid coding in between homework assignments. I’ve worked on it (with varying degrees of focus) continuously for the last 13 years, and I expect it’ll take me a long time to match that record with any other codebase. I’m glad to see the language moving forward, but at the same time I’ll miss Ruby Sass terribly.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank our users, especially those in the Ruby community in which Sass was born, for appreciating the language we created and evangelizing it so widely. Sass has an incredible userbase, and I’ve been so proud to see how large and diverse it’s grown over the years. Let’s keep it up as we move into a new era of Sass!