lessphp is a compiler for LESS written in PHP 5.3. It is a PHP 5.3 port from http://leafo.net/lessphp to bring PHP 5.3 conventions and autoloading to the lessphp library so that it can be used easily in a framework like Symfony2.

For a complete description of the language see http://leafo.net/lessphp/docs/

Download in vendor/lessphp:

git submodule add git://github.com/knplabs/lessphp.git vendor/lessphp

Edit your app/autoload.php:

$loader->registerNamespaces(array(
    'Lessphp'                        => __DIR__.'/../vendor/lessphp/src',
));

Copy less.inc.php to your include directory and include it into your project.

There are a few ways to interface with the compiler. The easiest is to have it compile a LESS file when the page is requested. The static function Less::ccompile, checked compile, will compile the input LESS file only when it is newer than the output file.

<?php
require_once 'lessphp/src/autoload.php';
use Lessphp\Lessc;

try {
    Lessc::ccompile('input.less', 'output.css');
catch (Exception $ex) {
    exit($ex->getMessage());
}

Note that all failures with lessc are reported through exceptions. If you need more control you can make your own instance of lessc.

<?php
require_once 'lessphp/src/autoload.php';
use Lessphp\Lessc;

$input = 'mystyle.less';

$lc = new Lessc($input);

try {
    file_put_contents('mystyle.css', $lc->parse());
} catch (Exception $ex) { ... }

In addition to loading from file, you can also parse from a string like so:

<?php
require_once 'lessphp/src/autoload.php';
use Lessphp\Lessc;

$lc = new Lessc();
$lesscode = 'body { ... }';
$out = $lc->parse($lesscode);

An additional script has been included to use the compiler from the command line. In the simplest invocation, you specify an input file and the compiled css is written to standard out:

~> plessc input.less > output.css

Using the -r flag, you can specify LESS code directly as an argument or, if the argument is left off, from standard in:

~> plessc -r "my less code here"

Finally, by using the -w flag you can watch a specified input file and have it compile as needed to the output file

~> plessc -w input-file output-file

Errors from watch mode are written to standard out.