DEV Community

Anthony Frehner
Anthony Frehner

Posted on • Edited on

Making CSS vars with SCSS vars

#css #scss #sass

SASS treats CSS variables (also known as custom properties) in a special way, which means it's a little difficult to create CSS vars dynamically:

Sass parses custom property declarations differently than other property declarations. All tokens, including those that look like SassScript, are passed through to CSS as-is.

SASS docs

Which can cause problems, especially for my situation where I want to

  1. Keep the SASS variables around because they're used in a lot of existing code, but also
  2. Add CSS variables for new code

So here's how I've worked around this. It's not ideal, because it still duplicates the name of the SASS variable, but it works for my situation. 🤷

$primary-color: #30dbb4;

@mixin add-css-variable($name, $color) {
  --#{$name}: $color;
}

:root {
  // repeat as necessary for all your vars
  @include add-css-variable('primary-color', $primary-color);
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You can test this out in the wonderful SassMeister playground

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
teetotum profile image
Martin • • Edited

As far as I know string interpolation is processed by sass when creating the css variable and its value:

$my-color: #123456;

.foo {
    --my-color: #{$my-color};
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

will produce:

.foo {
  --my-color: #123456;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I tried it on sassmeister. Maybe I'm missing something?

Read next

starbist profile image

Clamp it! VS Code extension

Silvestar Bistrović -

ridoy_hasan profile image

Building a Responsive Grid Layout with Tailwind CSS

Ridoy Hasan -

uthman_eli_cd82d29be9e571 profile image

How to Use Insomnia REST: A Comprehensive Guide

Uthman Eli -

kaja_uvais_a8691e947dd399 profile image

Top 3 Free Web Development Courses with Certificate

Kaja Uvais -