---
title: Ruby Sass
---

%p.introduction
  Ruby Sass was the original implementation of Sass, but it's since been
  deprecated. It's currently in a sunset maintenance period, and it will be
  officially unmaintained one year after the release of Dart Sass 1.0.0. Ruby
  Sass users should migrate to another implementation.

%ul.list-columns
  %li
    :markdown
      ### Maintenance Policy

      Ruby Sass will continue to be maintained for one year after the release of
      Dart Sass 1.0.0. During this maintenance period, bugs will be fixed as
      much as possible but no new features will be added. The only exception is
      for features that are necessary to support new CSS syntax, which will
      continue to be added.

      [Dart Sass][], the new primary implementation,
      doesn't always behave 100% the same as Ruby Sass—it implements a number of
      behavioral changes that were planned for Ruby Sass, but were never
      implemented in a stable version. To make migration easier, recent versions
      of Ruby Sass emit warnings for any code that won't be compatible with Dart
      Sass. Ongoing maintenance includes adding any warnings for new behavioral
      differences, if they come up.

      [Dart Sass]: #{url_for "dart-sass"}

      Once the maintenance period ends, Ruby Sass's repository will be archived,
      no more changes of any kind will be made, and no new releases will be cut.

      ### Adopt Ruby Sass

      Support for Ruby Sass is being turned down because the Sass core team no
      longer has time to maintain it as well as [Dart Sass][] and [LibSass][].
      But that doesn't mean it has to go away. If a community member wanted to
      take on the task of maintaining it, the core team would be happy to help
      get them up to speed. It's not an easy job: it would require keeping on
      top of bug fixes and implementing new language features as they're
      designed by the language team. But it would also be an opportunity to work
      on a project that's used be thousands of people every day.

      [LibSass]: #{url_for "libsass"}

      If you're interested in adopting Ruby Sass, send an email to
      [Natalie](mailto:nex342@gmail.com) and [Chris](mailto:chris@eppsteins.net)
      and they'll talk to you about next steps.

  %li
    :markdown
      ### Migrating Away

      If you run Ruby Sass using the command-line `sass` executable, all you
      need to do is install Dart Sass's [command-line executable][install]
      instead. The interface isn't identical, but most options work the same
      way.

      [install]: #{url_for "install"}

      If you use the `sass` gem as a library, the [`sassc`][] gem is the most
      seamless way to move away from Ruby Sass. It uses [LibSass][] to provide
      the same API for compiling Sass and defining custom functions as Ruby
      Sass, except that it uses the `SassC` module instead of `Sass`. However,
      it [doesn't yet][sassc#72] support the same `Importer` API. You can also
      use the [`sassc-rails`][] gem to plug smoothly into Ruby on Rails.

      [`sassc`]: http://rubygems.org/gems/sassc
      [LibSass]: #{url_for "libsass"}
      [sassc#72]: https://github.com/sass/sassc-ruby/issues/72
      [`sassc-rails`]: https://rubygems.org/gems/sassc-rails

      Alternately, if you're using a JS build system, you can integrate that
      with [Dart Sass][] as a JavaScript library.

      [Dart Sass]: #{url_for "dart-sass"}

      ### Installing

      If you need to install Ruby Sass for a legacy app, run

          gem install sass

      If you get a permissions error on Linux of Mac OS X, you may instead need
      to run

          sudo gem install sass

      Once Ruby Sass installed, try running

          sass --version

      If it installed correctly, this should print
      `Ruby Sass #{impl_version :ruby}`.