Dart Sass is On Chocolatey
Posted 13 January 2017 by Natalie Weizenbaum
One of the quieter benefits of moving to Dart is
how easy it is to distribute Dart applications. The Dart VM is able to bundle
all the sources for an application into one easy-to-load binary snapshot, which
means running a Dart application requires only three files: the dart
executable, the snapshot file, and a tiny shell script to invoke the app[1].
This is a huge relief coming from Ruby, which required a whole installation of
executables and libraries in order to run a single app.
Those three files are what we distribute today on our GitHub release page. But finding, downloading, and opening an archive and adding it to the command-line path is still a barrier to entry that we’d like to avoid where possible. Today we’re taking a step in that direction by releasing a Dart Sass package on Chocolatey, the Windows package manager. You can install it now using:
$ choco install sass -prerelease
This will give you a sass
executable that runs Dart Sass on the (really fast)
Dart VM.
A large percentage of Sass users are on Windows, and it hasn’t always been easy for them to get the latest and greatest Sass versions without a bunch of installation headaches. I’m excited that we can start taking advantage of our new infrastructure to fix that.
In addition to Chocolatey, we’d love to get Dart Sass on Homebrew for our OS X users. If you’re interested in helping out with that, let us know—this issue would be a great place to start!
There’s also an open issue for bundling the VM and the snapshot into a single executable file, which would allow us to pare down our distribution to a single file. ↩︎