I was trying to use Capifony, which requires Capistrano, which requires Ruby. But my apt version of ruby was old and was throwing syntax errors. So then I installed RVM and did
Solution
Just use lessphp. It can be installed with Composer, and then in config.yml:
lessphp: php: %kernel.root_dir%/../vendor/leafo/lessphp/lessc.inc.php apply_to: "\.less"