This plugin changes the behavior of Sass's @import directive so that if the same sass file is imported more than once, the second import will be a no-op. This allows dependencies to behave how most people expect them to behave and provides a considerable performance improvement for some sass projects.

Note: Although this plugin is maintained by compass, it can be used without compass in any Sass-based project.

Either add this line to your application's Gemfile if you have one:

gem 'compass-import-once', :require => 'compass/import-once/activate'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install compass-import-once

To use with the Sass command line:

sass -r 'compass/import-once/activate' ...

To enable in non-compass environments there's two options:

require 'compass/import-once/activate'

or you can activate it conditionally:

require 'compass/import-once'
Compass::ImportOnce.activate!

If a file must be imported a second time, you can force it by adding an exclamation mark to the end of the import url. E.g.

@import "something";
@import "something!"; // this will be imported again.