Official, paid Bootstrap themes are not nice

Many of us have used the bootstrap CSS framework over the years. It’s not the hotness anymore, but my management decided we should continue to use it, went on that website and bought a theme for ~100$.

Next, there was business a requirement for changing the primary color of the theme. The theme does not expose CSS variables for tweaking the colors (or anything useful). This feels wrong to me.

I proceeded by replacing the color values that I need to customize in _variables.scss, then tried to build the theme using the build process they had documented and the gulp script they had shipped in the repo. But it sucked a lot:

• Install was a pain, correct NPM version not documented, install did not work, had to coax the install to the point of basically rebuilding it from scratch.
• Grunt scrip theoretically offers live reload, but not feasible, because whatever garbage JS libraries they used are leaking gigabytes of memory and rebuilding from scratch, which takes absolutely forever
• A bunch of Docs/JS crap is included in the gulp script, there is no task to just build the CSS, I had to do that myself.
• Grunt script is shoddily made, saves two copies of everything it builds, does not clean properly, resulting in deleted stuff ghosting around in the final build

So this was not great. The way forward is obviously adding CSS variable support myself, so that we can get rid of this build process forever. So I tried injecting CSS variables as color values, but they are using SCSS color transform functions that make this fail.

As soon as I finally finish this hassle at work, I will publish the diffs for doing transform on top of a themed bootstrap 4.X build, in case I ever need to do this again in my next job, and in case it helps somebody.