PostCSS Sorting

PostCSS plugin to keep rules and at-rules content in order.

Lint and autofix stylesheet order with stylelint-order.

Features

• Sorts rules and at-rules content.
• Sorts properties.
• Sorts at-rules by different options.
• Groups properties, custom properties, dollar variables, nested rules, nested at-rules.
• Supports CSS, SCSS (using postcss-scss), CSS-in-JS (with postcss-styled-syntax), HTML (with postcss-html), and most likely any other syntax added by other PostCSS plugins.

Installation

npm install --save-dev postcss postcss-sorting

Options

The plugin has no default options. Everything is disabled by default.

• order: Specify the order of content within declaration blocks.
• properties-order: Specify the order of properties within declaration blocks.
• unspecified-properties-position: Specify position for properties not specified in properties-order.
• throw-validate-errors: Throw config validation errors instead of showing and ignoring them. Defaults to false.

Caveats

Handling comments

Comments that are before node and on a separate line linked to that node. Shared-line comments are also linked to that node. Shared-line comments are comments which are located after a node and on the same line as a node.

a {
	top: 5px; /* shared-line comment belongs to `top` */
	/* comment belongs to `bottom` */
	/* comment belongs to `bottom` */
	bottom: 15px; /* shared-line comment belongs to `bottom` */
}

Ignored at-rules

Some at-rules, like control and function directives in Sass, are ignored. It means rules won't touch content inside these at-rules, as doing so could change or break functionality.

CSS-in-JS

To avoid breaking the logic if the rule has a template literal interpolation, properties will be sorted only among neighbouring properties before or after the interpolation:

const Component = styled.div`
	/* 'z-index' and 'top' will be sorted as a single group. 'position' and 'display' will be sorted as a second group. Interpolation separates properties into groups. */
	z-index: 1;
	top: 1px;
	${props => props.great && 'color: red'};
	position: absolute;
	display: block;

	div {
		/* The following properties WILL be sorted together, because interpolation is for property value only */
		z-index: 2;
		position: static;
		top: ${2 + 10}px;
		display: inline-block;
	}
`;

Usage

See PostCSS docs for more examples.

Command Line

Add postcss-cli and PostCSS Sorting to your project:

npm install postcss postcss-cli postcss-sorting --save-dev

Create a postcss.config.js with PostCSS Sorting configuration:

export default {
	plugins: {
		'postcss-sorting': {
			order: [
				'custom-properties',
				'dollar-variables',
				'declarations',
				'at-rules',
				'rules',
			],

			'properties-order': 'alphabetical',

			'unspecified-properties-position': 'bottom',
		},
	},
};

Or, add the 'postcss-sorting' section to your existing postcss-cli configuration file.

Next execute:

npx postcss --no-map --replace your-css-file.css

For more information and options, please consult the postcss-cli docs.

Text editor

This plugin available as Sublime Text, Atom, VS Code, and Emacs plugin. Though, seems all these plugins are not maintained.

Benchmarking

The benchmark times only the plugin on real stylesheets, synthetic edge cases and hot helpers. Parsing and cloning are not measured.

pnpm benchmark --save=benchmark/results/baseline.json
# change the code, then:
pnpm benchmark --compare=benchmark/results/baseline.json

Run pnpm benchmark --help for all options.

Related tools

stylelint and stylelint-order help lint stylesheets and let you know if stylesheet order is correct. Also, they could autofix stylesheets.

I recommend Prettier for formatting stylesheets.