SASS Rendering in Go

I am beginning to use Go for web development, but I am having issues with asset management. I would prefer to have a tool like Rails' Asset Pipeline for managing (and compressing) css/js files (as well as SASS), but I am still able to work with css and js files.

While I am able to work with css and js, I am not able to work with SASS. Is there a way to use SASS in a Golang project? I am not using a framework.

Thank you!

I'm not familiar with Ruby on Rails but, I assume, that ruby on rails gave you some sort of tools for managing the source to distribution client-side asset transition (polyfills, transpiling, minification, compiling of SASS/SCSS to CSS, compiling of XScript to JavaScript ... etc).

While a web development framework might do that to try and ease in developers quickly (I assume rails does that, not ruby) its not exactly the way Go does stuff.

Go is a language, not a framework + language, just a compiler, a few build tools and a set of standards for how to write, test, document and indent stuff (with the indent,test and document part being optional).

A go server, at least the way I built servers with go, is somewhat decoupled from the client. It server static assets when they are needed (e.g. it serves the minified JavaScript and the stylsheets and the html, and jsons with info from the databases... etc), but it doesn't really care about what those are, its a server. The go toolchain is made for building golang applications (e.g. said server), but its not made for building client-side web applications (those consisting of js, css and html).

Now, you may use a framework similar to rails written in go that helps "pack up" css, js, html. But I'm unaware if there are any.

You may use a compiler which turns go into client-side code (i.e. javascript) https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs , if you enjoy the go toolchian and want to use it for client-side development. But, go-like performance isn't something this gives you AND you are working with a subset of go. Its really just a different way to write javascript.

However, what you most likely need in your case is a "build-chain" for your client side. Here there are 3 tools which (in my opinion) stand out in 2016:

npm
webpack
bower

I could write an essay about using this tools but here's the summary:

Webpack is used to create a "pipeline" for your code which does thing like, calling babel on javascript, compiling sass to css, minifying assets, allowing js to be written with import syntax... etc, really, its a swis army knife in your js development arsenal and probably matches the functionality of whatever you were using before.

Npm is the node package manager BUT even if you are not using node for your server. It can be useful to keep tracks of dependencies for building your application (like webpack) and for downloading modules. Its also useful for running various scripts and deployment, its a bit of an overkill to use both npm and weback though you will probably have an easier time setting up the webpack enviornment if you have a package.json (config file for npm) with each of your project.

Bower is one I actually don't use for small projects. But its basically a repository for javascript libraries (among other things), so you can easily say, write "bower install jquery" and you've downloaded jQuery for your current project.

Again, there are many other tools out there, these are just some of the ones I like, but, check some of them out. They can help you replaces your previous pipeline. Don't think of client and server side code as being the same, they are decoupled and having a strong separation between them might help you a lot.