How do I create dynamic CSS in Rails?

Question

Hi, what is the best/most efficient way of creating dynamic CSS with Rails. I am developing an admin area on a site, where I would like a user to be able to customize the style of their profiles(Colour mostly), which will also be saved.

Would you just embed ruby script in the css file? Would you need to change the file extension from css?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check this out: http://lesscss.org/

Answer 2

You can use ERB with CSS, you just need to render css in the controller. However, for such a heavily requested resource, I do not recommend generating this every time. I would store the users stylesheet in memcached or redis, and recall from it when the page loads, rather than rerendering the file each time. When they update their style, you can expire the cache, just make sure it gets rebuilt when the page renders.

Answer 3

I just built this for another site. I have a controller action and a view that pulls color values out of the database, then renders a customized CSS based on the current user's account. To optimize, I am using the built in Rails page caching, which stores a copy on disk and serves it as a static asset. Nice and fast.

Here's an example from the ERB code

#header { background: <%= @colors["Header Stripe Background"] %>; border: 1px solid <%= @colors["Header Stripe Border"] %>; }
#header h1 {color: <%= @colors["Headline Color"] %>; }
#header p a { background: <%= @colors["Control Link Background"] %>; color: <%= @colors["Control Links"] %>;}
#header p a:hover {background: <%= @colors["Control Link Hover"] %>; text-decoration:underline;}