How to compile and install the sassc-ruby gem on Windows

sassc-ruby windows installation.md

Windows installation

This will install SassC Ruby gem on Windows.

1. Download and install Ruby 2 (http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/)
2. Download and install the ruby development kit (http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/) (for the rest of the document, assuming it's installed into c:\devkit\)
3. Download the libdl library for Windows (https://github.com/dlfcn-win32/dlfcn-win32) Go to releases and download the most recent precompiled version.
4. Extract the libdl package into your development kit mingw directory: e.g. extract the package (lib\ and include\) into c:\devkit\mingw\
5. Try installing gem install sassc (might fail)
6. If it installs successfully then try the sassc compilation test (at the bottom of this file)
7. If failed to install properly then edit the libsass Makefile: c:\ruby2\lib\ruby\gems\2.2.0\gems\sassc-1.8.1\ext\libsass\Makefile

Edit the makefile and force it to build a static library (especially under MinGW). Set the following variables to 1:

	STATIC_ALL       ?= 1
	STATIC_LIBGCC    ?= 1
	STATIC_LIBSTDCPP ?= 1

8. Start the dev kit command prompt: c:\devkit\msys.bat
9. Navigate to the sassc gem directory: c:\ruby2\lib\ruby\gems\2.2.0\gems\sassc-1.8.1\ext\libsass
10. Run make lib/libsass.so LDFLAGS="-Wall -O2" to compile the library.
11. DONE. Try the sassc compilation test.

SASSC Compilation test

Copy and paste into sassc.rb:

require 'sassc'

# Simple scss content
data = <<-eos
$temp: red;
body {
	color: $temp;
}
eos

# Compile and print the result
result = SassC::Engine.new(data).render
puts "result=#{result}"

Then from a command prompt run:

$ ruby sassc.rb

Expected output:

result=body {
  color: red; }

Links which helped

Libsass build documentation:

• libsass/docs/build.md
• Building LibSass with MingGW (on Windows)

Problem: ld cannot find -ldl compiler error message
Fix: steps 3 and 4, install libdl into mingw dev environment
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12455160/using-libdl-so-in-mingw

Problem: ruby_ffi "The specified module could not be found" error
Fix: step 7, build static library with libgcc
http://ffi.github.io/ruby-ffi-archive/messages/20110430-Re_%5Bruby-ffi%5D%20need%20help%20loading%20a%20library-805.html