This issue has come up before, but not for about ten months -- would be good to have an update...

I'm a newbie playing with the demo theme to understand October.

In /assets/less/layouts/all.less I changed

body {
    padding-top: 50px;
}

to

body {
    padding-top: 200px;
}

A change that, if successful, would be obvious. However, nothing changed on web page refresh (<ctrl>-r).

The first three results from a Google search on october cms preferred way to compile less are forum posts:

1) How to compile theme.less? 2) LESS compiler for OctoberCMS 3) Updated less files, not showing up after page refreshes..

1) & 2) told me that in /layouts/default.htm I need to replace

    <link href="{{ [
        'assets/css/theme.css'
    ]|theme }}" rel="stylesheet">

with

    <link href="{{ [
        'assets/less/theme.less'
    ]|theme }}" rel="stylesheet">

This worked until I made another change.

Then I discovered I could run, php artisan cache:clear in the TLD.

Now I seem to be able to make any change to a .less file, and then clear the cache, and the new css is compiled and downloaded to the browser on <ctrl>-r.

Is this current best practice, or is there a preferred/better way?

Last updated 8 years ago

Ah. Just discovered that, as

Daniel81 said:

Yeah, it's a frustrating bug I've found while working in themes that you have to save the "master" LESS file for any changes to be compiled in "child" LESS files - bit annoying - hope they get round to fixing it soon.

For the phpless compiler to 'see' a change to any .less file, you have to make a change to /assets/less/theme.less and save it, before then clearing the cache and reloading the page.

Still, is there yet a way to automate this without resorting to Grunt, Brunch, Gulp, ... ?

Maybe this can help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMKMZqALISI