bourbon

Bourbon was a library of tools for Sass, a language that extends CSS to make writing styles for websites easier. Sass lets you use variables, functions, and reusable chunks of code called mixins. Bourbon provided a curated set of those mixins and functions to handle common styling tasks without adding bloat or imposing a visual style on your project.

The key thing to know upfront is that this project was deprecated in September 2024 and is no longer maintained. The team behind it posted a blog post explaining how to replace each of Bourbon's helpers with modern CSS features that browsers now support natively, since many of the problems Bourbon originally solved no longer require a library.

When it was active, Bourbon was designed to be dependency-free (pure Sass with no other requirements), focused on readable code rather than terseness, and lightweight in that it added no extra output to your compiled CSS on its own. It worked with Ruby on Rails projects, as a standalone Ruby gem, and also through npm for JavaScript-based build pipelines.

Installing it involved either a Ruby gem command or an npm package, then a single import line at the top of your Sass files. Once imported, all of Bourbon's mixins and functions were available throughout your stylesheets. It also included a small command-line tool with install and update commands.

If you are looking at this project because it appears in an existing codebase, the README recommends migrating away from it toward native CSS. If you are considering using it in a new project, it is no longer a suitable choice given that it receives no further updates.