WebEssentials less support not working

Question

I'm using VS 2013 Update 4, with Web Essentials installed (the latest version)

If I create a brand new project, and add one .less file with nothing in it but a body declaration

body {
  font-size: 10px;
}

I get this error "Compilation Error occurred (see error list to navigate to the error location):".

The error list is completely empty however.

I've done everything I've read, like uninstall / reinstall.

Hard to believe this is so hard and doesn't work out of the box?

Is there something else I can use that will convert to .css files within Visual Studio upon save?

Thanks, this is frustrating!!

Answer 1

I tracked down a way to fix this with the current version of WE (the issue is due to either NodeJS not being packed right or extracted right - not sure which). So to fix this simply reinstall node and set the modules back up

• Locate the path where WE is installed

• Should be something like C:\Users\$username\APPDATA\LOCAL\MICROSOFT\VISUALSTUDIO\12.0\Extensions\$random_folder

• Run the commands necessary to reinstall node & set the modules back up

I made a powershell script to do this for you open powershell and run

iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://gist.githubusercontent.com/iamkrillin/e5e95f0193eef4358e09/raw/301c170e9eed302f09f0f577dc0ab26be4cc09ea/we.ps1'))

You can view the script here. https://gist.github.com/iamkrillin/e5e95f0193eef4358e09#file-we-ps1

UPDATE

An update has been released to address this problem

Answer 2

I had the same issue with the 2.5.2 update.

I ended up uninstalling version 2.5.2. and installed the stable 2.5 version https://github.com/madskristensen/WebEssentials2013/releases/tag/v2.5 (.vsix)

After this everything was working again.

So:

• Uninstall 2.5.2
• Restart VS 2013
• Install 2.5 (.visx)
• tada

Answer 3

For me the problem was a hash(#) in the folder structur where my project was in.

So C:\Develop\C#\MyProject\... failed while C:\Develop\CSharp\MyProject\... worked.