Inheritance and Extends

Definition

Another great feature of Sass is inheritance. We implement this using the @extend directive.

Inheritance is a feature of SASS that allows multiple classes to share a common set of properties with one another.

Example

Some typical CSS code for styling a button:

.button {
  background-color: #0000FF; // Blue
  border: none;
  color: white;
  padding: 15px 32px;
  text-align: center;
  text-decoration: none;
  display: inline-block;
  font-size: 1.5rem;
}

If we happen to have a number of buttons on our website, all of which are styled in a similar manner, we would have a good case for inheritance!

We would implement a secondary button via inheritence like so:

.button-secondary {
  @extend .button;
  background-color: #4CAF50; // Green
}  

Our .button-secondary class will take on all of the properties and values set the .button class, with the exception of background-color which we’ve decided to set to green.

Try it out below!