After a couple of years with our full-stack PhoenixFramework app on production, there have been a constant: node-sass breaks a lot. Every couple of weeks not paying attention to node modules, resulted in security patches to apply, that where blocked by node-sass not being able to compile because some random reason.

When Phoenix 1.6 was released, with node and WebPack free asset build, We decided to plan the migration out of WebPack and the main motivator, was get rid of as many node dependencies as possible. At the end we keep some node modules, all related to bootstrap.

The process we follow was based on the documentation provided by:

https://github.com/phoenixframework/esbuild
https://github.com/CargoSense/dart_sass

The decision to use Dart Sass was due to the decision by the sass project to not add more features to it. Also, if we could get rid of the single binary dependency that is the cause for most of the issues, was a big plus.

Everything went smoothly, until we try to deploy.

Our infrastructure deploys to VMs in RackSpace. We use the Travis CI process to compile and deploy the application. We are able to just build a tar file that gets pushed and deployed to the RS servers with Capistrano. Very little dependencies on the server side, no build tools on there, no ruby, elixir or OTP installed, just basic Linux installation.

So we followed instructions and installed Linux Homebrew (linuxbrew):

before_install:
  - /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
  - export PATH=/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH
  - test -r ~/.bash_profile && echo "eval \"\$($(brew --prefix)/bin/brew shellenv)\"" >> ~/.bashrc
  - brew install sass/sass/sass

Which resulted in this error:

pub get
Because sass depends on cli_pkg ^2.1.0 which doesn't match any versions, version solving failed.

After some research I found the culprit:

Tl;DR: A dart-sass dependency (cli_pkg) publish version 2.1.0, people start including it in their libraries, then retracted, so now dart-sass can't build the package.

So I start looking for alternatives, and my first try was override the tapped version because, why not?

 - brew tap sass/sass
  - sed -i 's/archive\/1\.49\.10/archive\/1.49.9/' /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Homebrew/Library/Taps/sass/homebrew-sass/sass.rb
  - sed -i 's/3887b89d99fd52e49e5a33ec78b3705a25a6267bd9f85c16fc85a6f4bdf154e5/0df1e9d5ff73a752fe864fac58d8a010c3a089b07d9ba9a05f54d493fd26af8b/' /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Homebrew/Library/Taps/sass/homebrew-sass/sass.rb
Author

After realizing how terrible this is, and reading again the documentation from dart-sass I saw how clear they recommend using the prebuilt binaries, so I did that:

before_install:
  - rvm install 'ruby-3.0.0'
  - curl -L https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/releases/download/1.49.10/dart-sass-1.49.10-linux-x64.tar.gz > dart-sass-1.49.10-linux-x64.tar.gz
  - tar -xvf dart-sass-1.49.10-linux-x64.tar.gz
  - echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/build/amco/contentinator/dart-sass:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

Which works great!

The issue was a problem for me from yesterday, today I found the workaround and by now the bug has been resolved. I haven't try again to use Linuxbrew, and probably I will not, I might just keep the standalone library and just write some task insdie capistrano to handle versioning.

The PR was pushed and my package-lock.json file wen't from 13k+ lines, to just 75. 🎉