Rails 3 + Twitter Bootstrap + SASS setup

I am trying to track down some tricky interactions. Here's the scenario:

I am using sass-twitter-bootstrap github repo. I have copied over the complete set of scss files into my assets/twitter directory

When my application.css looks like this:

*= require_self
*= require twitter/bootstrap
*= require_tree .

Refreshing the home page gives me this error:

Undefined variable: "$baseLineHeight".
  (in /Volumes/MonsterHD/mydev/repsurv/app/assets/stylesheets/twitter/_accordion.scss)

When my application.css looks like this:

*= require_self
*= require twitter/bootstrap

Then I get no error, but my custom.css.scss is not applied.

And my custom.css.sccs looks like this:

@import "twitter/bootstrap";

/* universal */
html {
  overflow-y: scroll;
}
body {
  padding-top: 60px;
}
section {
  overflow: auto;
}
textarea {
  resize: vertical;
}
.center {
  text-align: center;
}
.center h1 {
  margin-bottom: 10px;
}

#logo {
  float: left;
  margin-right: 10px;
  font-size: 1.7em;
  color: #fff;
  text-transform: uppercase;
  letter-spacing: -1px;
  padding-top: 9px;
  font-weight: bold;
  line-height: 1;
}
#logo:hover {color: #fff;
  text-decoration: none;
}

Here is my gem file:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails'
gem 'american_date'
gem 'will_paginate'
gem 'bootstrap-will_paginate'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'sass-rails'

group :development, :test do
  gem 'sqlite3'
  gem 'hirb'
  gem 'pry'
  gem 'pry-rails'
end


# Gems used only for assets and not required
# in production environments by default.

group :assets do
  gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.1'
  gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

group :development, :test do
    gem 'rspec-rails'
    gem 'factory_girl_rails'
end

group :test do
  gem 'capybara'
  gem 'faker'
  gem 'launchy'
end

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
end

Solution

You don't want *= require_tree . as that will, as you've seen, require everything. You want *= require_directory . which will only require files in the root of the directory (ie. it won't descend into sub directories).

As another approach, this is what I used in a recent project setup like yours:

application.css.scss:

/*
 *= require_self
 */

$logo_green: #3b5263;

@import 'smoothness/jquery-ui-1.8.21.custom.css';
@import 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.scss';
@import 'content.css.scss';

bootstrap_and_overrides.css.scss:

// Set the correct sprite paths
$iconSpritePath: image-url('glyphicons-halflings.png');
$iconWhiteSpritePath: image-url('glyphicons-halflings-white.png');

// override bootstrap colors
$linkColor: lighten(#355c74, 10%);

@import 'bootstrap';
body { padding-top: $navbarHeight + 10px; }
@import 'bootstrap-responsive';
....

And then my content.css.scss contains all my app specific stuff.