Dart Sass is On Chocolatey

Posted 13 January 2017 by Natalie Weizenbaum

One of the quieter benefits of moving to Dart is how easy it is to distribute Dart applications. The Dart VM is able to bundle all the sources for an application into one easy-to-load binary snapshot, which means running a Dart application requires only three files: the dart executable, the snapshot file, and a tiny shell script to invoke the app¹. This is a huge relief coming from Ruby, which required a whole installation of executables and libraries in order to run a single app.

Those three files are what we distribute today on our GitHub release page. But finding, downloading, and opening an archive and adding it to the command-line path is still a barrier to entry that we’d like to avoid where possible. Today we’re taking a step in that direction by releasing a Dart Sass package on Chocolatey, the Windows package manager. You can install it now using:

$ choco install sass -prerelease

This will give you a sass executable that runs Dart Sass on the (really fast) Dart VM.

A large percentage of Sass users are on Windows, and it hasn’t always been easy for them to get the latest and greatest Sass versions without a bunch of installation headaches. I’m excited that we can start taking advantage of our new infrastructure to fix that.

In addition to Chocolatey, we’d love to get Dart Sass on Homebrew for our OS X users. If you’re interested in helping out with that, let us know—this issue would be a great place to start!