Drupal theming with Netbeans & Sass

I have recently switched development environment from Mac to Ubuntu. By and large this has proved a really positive experience as I can so closely match my development machine to the production servers we run. I ran into one sticking point during set up - configuring Netbeans to compile SASS. This ought to be straightforward and it is, although I couldn't find any clear documentation. So to save anyone else similar pain, here are the steps I went through to get my set up working.

Download and install sass & compass (there are so many tutorials on this I won't repeat them here)

Check it's all working by running a watch from the command line - once you know your set up is working, turn off the compiler

Open your Drupal project in Netbeans

Go File | Project Properties

Select CSS Preprocessors from the list

Click 'Compile SASS on save'

Click 'Configure Executables' and make sure your SASS compiler is pointing to the right place - as I had installed using apt-get this was alreeady there for me - /usr/local/bin/sass

Set your compiler to Open Output on Error and Generate Extra information - this is really useful for when you start debugging why your set up isn't working ;-)

Close the dialog and go back to your first Preprocessors setting screen and set up your paths

You'll probably only need one entry with the two paths - something like sites/all/themes/mytheme/sass & sites/all/themes/mytheme/css - important - this refers to the paths to your folders relative to Netbeans project root - I wasted a lot of time here using absolute paths, and setting up individual paths for each of my scss files

Add --compass into Compiler options if you're using it & click OK

Back in the project, make sure you select IDE Log from the View menu so you can see what happens when you compile - this should help you see if there are any problems with your compiler or (more likely) your paths - fix these and you should be good to go!