magento2-module-less-js-compiler | Allows Magento 2 to compile less files

magento2-module-less-js-compiler is a PHP library. magento2-module-less-js-compiler has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

This module was built out of frustration about the slow deployments of static assets to a production environment while running bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy. In particular this module tries to tackle the slowness which comes with compiling less files using the less.php library, which Magento 2 uses by default. This module provides a solution by using the original less.js compiler which was written in javascript and is executed through node.js We have benchmarked the difference between the less.php and less.js compilers, and the less.js compiler is somewhere between 1.5 and 3 times as fast as the less.php compiler, although it depends on your PHP version. If you run PHP 5.x the performance increase will be much higher, PHP 7.x is actually quite fast by itself, but the nodejs version still beats it. Update: Since Magento 2.3.0, it seems like the performance differences between less.php and less.js are not very big anymore. I have the suspicion this might have something to do with newer releases of the less.php library. Which got released somewhere around the period when Magento 2.2.3 & 2.1.12 were released. So it's possible that the performance difference for Magento 2.2.x and 2.1.x might also be less significant then how it's displayed below if you upgrade the less.php library to the latest version (v1.7.0.14 at the time of writing). This is a bit of speculation, since unfortunately I didn't keep track of the version of the less.php library which I've used in the benchmarks, so I'm not sure about this statement. Since Magento 2.4.0 (or newer PHP versions?), the performance differences seems to have changed in favor of less.php. But you might still want to use this module so that the outputted css is the same between your local development environment and a production environment.