node-sass Discontinued Maintenance

Recently while looking at dependency package upgrades for an old project, I noticed that node-sass has been discontinued from maintenance, so I’m documenting this specifically.

Main Reasons

1. Insufficient Maintenance Manpower

• The recent maintenance team no longer has enough bandwidth (energy and time) to continue updating the project
• node-sass hasn’t had a new release version for a year and a half

2. Technical Evolution Process

• node-sass was the first official Sass compiler available in the JavaScript ecosystem
• It’s essentially a Node.js wrapper for LibSass
• Now the official recommendation is to use Dart Sass as the primary implementation

3. Current Status

• The npm package has been marked as deprecated
• The GitHub repository has been archived to avoid confusion with active Sass repositories
• The underlying LibSass implementation:
  • Although deprecated, it hasn’t completely reached end-of-life
  • Maintainer Marcel Greter still occasionally makes fixes
  • There’s no officially supported way to use this implementation from Node.js

Migration Recommendation

If you’re currently still using node-sass, the official strongly recommends migrating to the primary implementation Dart Sass.

Historical Significance

This change marks an important transition in the Sass ecosystem:

1. Initially developed in the Ruby community
2. node-sass helped it take root in the JavaScript ecosystem
3. Now shifting to Dart Sass as the primary implementation

Reference Sources

• Node Sass is end-of-life