Tutorial

Nesting Selectors in Sass

Published on September 19, 2016
    Default avatar

    By Alligator.io

    Nesting Selectors in Sass

    While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

    Sass allows you to easily nest your selectors and organize your rules hierarchically:

    .main {
      background-color: antiquewhite;
      margin: 0 auto;
    
      img {
        max-width: 100%;
        transform: rotate(3deg);
      }
      p:first-child {
        font-size: 1.2em;
    span {
      background-color: burlywood;
      padding: 0.2em 0.4em;
    }
    

    The above, once compiled to CSS, would yield the following:

    .main {
      background-color: antiquewhite;
      margin: 0 auto;
    }
    .main img {
      max-width: 100%;
      transform: rotate(3deg);
    }
    .main p:first-child {
      font-size: 1.2em;
    }
    .main p:first-child span {
      background-color: burlywood;
      padding: 0.2em 0.4em;
    }
    

    Properties in the same namespace

    You can also nest properties that are in the same namespace. For example, background properties can be nested like this. Notice the use of a colon after the background keyword in the example:

    .main {
      margin: 0 auto;
    
    
    

    This would yield the following CSS:

    .main {
      margin: 0 auto;
      background-color: antiquewhite;
      background-image: url(images/gator.svg);
      background-repeat: repeat-x;
      background-size: 36px 48px;
    }
    

    👉 Over-nesting can create messy CSS, so keep it at a maximum of just a few levels deep.

    Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

    Learn more about us


    About the authors
    Default avatar
    Alligator.io

    author

    Still looking for an answer?

    Ask a questionSearch for more help

    Was this helpful?
     
    Leave a comment
    

    This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

    You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

    Try DigitalOcean for free

    Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

    Sign up

    Join the Tech Talk
    Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

    Please complete your information!

    Get our biweekly newsletter

    Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

    Hollie's Hub for Good

    Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

    Become a contributor

    Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

    Welcome to the developer cloud

    DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

    Learn more
    DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel