cssnow

A CSS pre-processor, really simple to set up, sort of like cssnext used to be.

Back when we were young, cssnext used to be pretty simple: you installed it, you ran it, it worked. Nowadays, cssnext has evolved to build atop PostCSS, with lots of configuration coming with.

I have nothing against that move. It's a lot more powerful and flexible, and overall I think it is absolutely the right thing to do. But we have lots of repos, and they all need a default that's pretty much what cssnext used to be. So what cssnow does is pretty much that: use cssnext and PostCSS with a default setup that matches what we need. It's a whole lot fewer direct dependencies to worry about, and a way to centralise options we like (such as being safe out of the box when minifying).

This is for you if you like these defaults and don't want to think too much about your CSS pre-processing; if you prefer the flexibility and power stick to the full PostCSS stack!

Installation

The usual:

npm install --save cssnow

Usage

cssnow [options] <input> <output>

If output is unspecified, it prints to standard out; likewise if input is not specified it reads from standard in.

When NODE_ENV is set to production, it minifies and does not report errors; otherwise it does not minify but reports errors. Due to this behaviour, it (currently) produces no source maps.

Options include:

• -w, --watch: enter watch mode

API

You can use cssnow as a library. It exports a single function (the default one). Call it with options and a callback. The options (all of which are optional) are:

• watch: boolean, enter watch mode or not.
• input: input path.
• output: output path.

The callback will receive an error if there was one, just null otherwise.

It also has a few named exports: production, development, and configuration which are all the configuration objects for the respective environments plus the resolved one — these can be used with external tools that support a PostCSS configuration, such as webpack.

Global installation

You may install it globally if you wish to (with npm install -g cssnow), it will just work.