---
title: Ruby Sass
introduction: >
  Ruby Sass was the original implementation of Sass, but it reached its end of
  life as of 26 March 2019. It's no longer supported, and Ruby Sass users should
  migrate to another implementation.
---

%ul.list-columns
  %li
    :markdown
      ## But Why?

      When Natalie and Hampton first created Sass in 2006, Ruby was the language
      at the cutting edge of web development, the basis of their
      already-successful [Haml][] templating language, and the language they
      used most in their day-to-day work. Writing Sass in Ruby made it readily
      available to their existing users and the whole booming Ruby ecosystem.

      [Haml]: http://haml.info/

      Since then, Node.js has become ubiquitous for frontend tooling while Ruby
      has faded into the background. At the same time, Sass projects have grown
      far larger than we initially envisioned them, and their performance needs
      have outpaced the speed Ruby can provide. Both [Dart Sass][] and
      [LibSass][] are blazing fast, easy to install, and are readily available
      on npm. Ruby Sass couldn't keep up, and it didn't make sense to spend the
      core team's resources on it any longer.

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

  %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"}