less-loader-plugins

LESS plugins for various loaders.

While other plugins do exist online, the problem I've noticed with a lot of them is that they are over-complicated and inject automatically into the head tag. Because they automatically inject, this puts a runtime dependency on the plugin. Adding the style should be handled by the developer. All of these plugins work on that principle, and there's no plans to add this feature.

Why not use SASS and Webpack?

• I prefer portability of code and not having to be forced to use certain tools to run my app in development.
• There's really no noticeable performance difference whether or not the server does the compilation or the client does.
• Have you seen the code for SASS on the browser? Impossible to debug if you run into issues. Also unsupported by the SASS team who are developing their tool using Ruby which is another tool that needs to be installed.
• Commonly used functionality is practically identical between LESS and SASS.

Supported Loaders

less.amd.js

Used by Lamda or any other AMD loader. Configure your require configuration to add the following mappings:

var require = {
    paths: {
        "less": "<node_modules>/less/dist/less",
        "styles": '<node_modules>/less-loader-plugins/less.amd' 
    }  
};

You can then use the plugin syntax to load LESS files:

define([
    'styles!./MyStyles.less'
], function (styles) {
    // Attach styles to head tag. 
});

less.systemjs.js

Used by SystemJS. Configure the SystemJS configuration file to add the following mappings:

 System.config({
    paths: {
        'npm:': 'node_modules/'
    },
 
    map: {
        'styles': 'npm:less-loader-plugins/less.systemjs.js',
        'less': 'npm:less/dist/less.js'
    },
    packages: {
        src: {
            meta: {
                '*.less': {
                    loader: 'styles'
                }
            }
        }
    }
});

You can then import styles using the following in your code:

import styles from './MyStyles.less';
 
// Attach styles to head tag.