[Question] Can you suggest a way to @import less code form a different app

[camilotorresf]

Hi,

I'm migrating a project from Django 1.11 to 3.2, and also migrating django-pipeline from 1.6.9 to 2.0.6.
Now, we have many django apps and in one app I'm importing less (CSS compiler) code from another app:

in admin_main/static/admin_main/less/common.less, which is located inside the admin_main app I have

@import "../../common/third_party/bootstrap/less/variables";
@import "../../common/less/styles/flexbox.less";
@import "../../common/less/lib/spacing.less";
@import "../../common/less/lib/ng-animate.less"

All these 4 less files are located in the common app:
common/static/common/third_party/bootstrap/less/variables.less
common/static/common/less/styles/flexbox.less
common/static/common/less/lib/spacing.less
common/static/common/less/lib/ng-animate.less

The problem is when collecting statics and compiling admin_main/static/admin_main/less/common.less, lessc cannot find the imported files, because these files are in a complete different directory, and the relative paths cannot be found.

With django-pipeline 1.6.9 these files were found, because the file to process was not the project file, but the collected file inside my collectedstatic directory: deploy/admin/collectedstatic/admin_main/less/common.less, and of course the 4 imported files are also inside the collectedstatic directory, and all works, because lessc can find them in the same collectedstatic directory.

I have found that the problem was introduced by this commit:
63d1182
When I revert the commit it works as before. For now, I'm going to fork and use a customized version of django-pipeline.

I kindly ask: is it possible, and how do you suggest to solve these relative imports from a different Django application with the official django-pipeline package?

Is it OK to create a Pull Request to modify that commit and only use the project_infile when PIPELINE_COLLECTOR_ENABLED == False ?

Thank you for the time you can spend on this.

[camilotorresf]

I created this PR:
#750

[ex5]

Also running into this problem with SASS @imports referencing files from outside the app. Our setup is very similar to described above: imported files are located in a different directory listed under STATICFILES_DIRS, and referenced by files inside an app.

It seems to be possible to write the imports in a way that they
(a) either work during collectstatic and then break in dev server with CompileError ... Error: File to import not found or unreadable, or
(b) work in dev server and fail with the same error during collectstatic.

In (a) imports must be relative to the STATIC_DIR and in (b) they must be relative to the app's directory with the source file using the @import. Having both work appears to be impossible, unless relative paths accidentally have the same nesting relative to both STATIC_DIR and to the app's static.

It's really a showstopper for us, because we have styles reused in different Django projects.

It looks like there are a couple of forgotten PRs that attempt to fix the problem:

#750
#150

as well as an abandoned discussion in #487

@peymanslh any suggestions on how to make this work?
(not sure whom to tag, so tagging whomever shows up in recent merges)