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SCSS styleguide

This style guide recommends best practices for SCSS to make styles easy to read, easy to maintain, and performant for the end-user.

Rules

Naming

CSS classes should use the lowercase-hyphenated format rather than snake_case or camelCase.

// Bad
.class_name {
  color: #fff;
}

// Bad
.className {
  color: #fff;
}

// Good
.class-name {
  color: #fff;
}

Formatting

You should always use a space before a brace, braces should be on the same line, each property should each get its own line, and there should be a space between the property and its value.

// Bad
.container-item { 
  width: 100px; height: 100px;
  margin-top: 0;
}

// Bad
.container-item
{
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  margin-top: 0;
}

// Bad
.container-item{
  width:100px;
  height:100px;
  margin-top:0;
}

// Good
.container-item {
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  margin-top: 0;
}

Note that there is an exception for single-line rulesets, although these are not typically recommended.

p { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

Colors

HEX (hexadecimal) colors short-form should use shortform where possible, and should use lower case letters to differenciate between letters and numbers, e. g. #E3E3E3 vs. #e3e3e3.

// Bad
p {
  color: #ffffff;
}

// Bad
p {
  color: #FFFFFF;
}

// Good
p {
  color: #fff;
}

Indentation

Indentation should always use two spaces for each indentation level.

// Bad, four spaces
p {
    color: #f00;
}

// Good
p {
  color: #f00;
}

Semicolons

Always include semicolons after every property. When the stylesheets are minified, the semicolons will be removed automatically.

// Bad
.container-item {
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px
}

// Good
.container-item {
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
}

Shorthand

The shorthand form should be used for properties that support it.

// Bad
margin: 10px 15px 10px 15px;
padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;

// Good
margin: 10px 15px;
padding: 10px;

Zero Units

Omit length units on zero values, they're unnecessary and not including them is slightly more performant.

// Bad
.item-with-padding {
  padding: 0px;
}

// Good
.item-with-padding {
  padding: 0;
}

Selectors with a `js-` Prefix

Do not use any selector prefixed with js- for styling purposes. These selectors are intended for use only with JavaScript to allow for removal or renaming without breaking styling.

Linting

We use SCSS Lint to check for style guide conformity. It uses the ruleset in .scss-lint.yml, which is located in the home directory of the project.

To check if any warnings will be produced by your changes, you can run rake scss_lint in the GitLab directory. SCSS Lint will also run in GitLab CI to catch any warnings.

If the Rake task is throwing warnings you don't understand, SCSS Lint's documentation includes a full list of their linters.

Fixing issues

If you want to automate changing a large portion of the codebase to conform to the SCSS style guide, you can use CSSComb. First install Node and NPM, then run npm install csscomb -g to install CSSComb globally (system-wide). Run it in the GitLab directory with csscomb app/assets/stylesheets to automatically fix issues with CSS/SCSS.

Note that this won't fix every problem, but it should fix a majority.

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