less.php

The dynamic stylesheet language.

about

This is a PHP port of the official JavaScript version of LESS http://lesscss.org.

Most of the code structure remains the same, which should allow for fairly easy updates in the future. That does mean this library requires PHP5.3 as it makes heavy use of namespaces, anonymous functions and the shorthand ternary operator - ?: (to replicate the way Javascript will return the value of the first valid operand when using ||).

A couple of things have been omitted from this initial version:

Evaluation of JavaScript expressions within back-ticks (for obvious reasons).
Definition of custom functions - will be added to the \Less\Environment class.
A tidy up of the API is needed.

Note: This repo is no longer maintained. The Wikimedia Foundation now managing a more up to date version of my original code base at https://github.com/wikimedia/less.php (based on additional work by Martin Jantošovič, Josh Schmidt and others). I'd suggest starting there if you need to compile Less files in PHP.

use

The parser

<?php

$parser = new \Less\Parser();
$parser->getEnvironment()->setCompress(true);

// parse css from a less source file or directly from a string
$css = $parser
            ->parseFile($path)
            ->parse("@color: #4D926F; #header { color: @color; } h2 { color: @color; }")
            ->getCss();

The command line tool

The bin/lessc command line tool will accept an input (and optionally an output) file name to process.

$ ./bin/lessc input.less output.css

In your website

The bin/less.php file can be moved to the directory containing your less source files. Including a links as follows will compile and cache the css.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/less/css.php?bootstrap.less" />

NB: You'll need to update this file to point to the lib directory, and also make sure the ./cache directory is writable by the web server.

license

See LICENSE file.