Installing Compass & Sass on Dreamhost

Question

I would like to get going with Compass and Sass on my Dreamhost webspace. Unfortunately it is not part of the provided standard gems so the installation appears to be more complicated. Does anyone have hands on experience with installing and running Compass and Sass on Dreamhost?

I'd appreciate any guidance.

Answer 1

I was facing a similar challenge - installing Sass/Compass on dreamhost shared account - but was able to figure out how to do it. I used these instructions for installing my own copy of RubyGems (although I'm not completely sure that was necessary). Then I just used the following two commands to install sass and compass:

gem install sass
gem install compass

It all went pretty smoothly.

Answer 2

One option is to just precompile your sass (compass compile) on your machine and then upload just the CSS, so you don't actually need compass installed there.

Or, if you're in a ruby project, use bundler. It will install the gems under the project.

If you're using a Dreamhost VPS (I would recommend it over the shared hosting) then you also have sudo access, and you can install it globally by logging in as an admin user (set this up in the panel).