Setting gist

Setting Up Tailwind CSS In A React Project

SUMMARY:

This article introduces Tailwind CSS, a CSS library that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without opinionated styles. You’ll also learn how to seamlessly set up Tailwind CSS in a React project.

In the dispensation of CSS libraries and frameworks, a ton of awesome libraries have been built to simplify the work of a developer in the quest to create intuitive interfaces. However, quite a lot of them (Bootstrap, Foundation) impose design decisions that are difficult to undo; they come with predefined components, therefore, eliminating the need for dynamic customization. This is the reason why Tailwind CSS is considered to be a good choice for building 21st-century web interfaces.

With Tailwind CSS, you get to create the components that suit what you want or what you are working on. These components can be created by harnessing the power of the utility-first prowess of Tailwind CSS. If you are tired of making use of Bootstrap and its likes, you’ll find Tailwind CSS a good fit for working on beautiful interfaces as you implement the designs you need using the utility classes it provides.

In this tutorial, you will learn what Tailwind CSS is and how to work with it. In the end, you’ll have built a profile card that uses Tailwind CSS utility classes. After that, you can go on to build a portfolio website that showcases your skills and other things you have worked on.

What Is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a utility-based low-level CSS framework intended to ease building web applications with speed and less focus to writing custom CSS, without leaving the comfort zone of your HTML code, yet achieve awesome interfaces.

For example, you could style a button with just a few classes (instead of always having to declare a single big class separately from your HTML and writing a bunch of properties to make something):

<button class="bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded ml-4 mt-4">
  Button
</button>

Other CSS frameworks (such as Bootstrap) present you with diverse predefined components (such as modals, buttons, alerts, cards). But with Tailwind CSS, you get to make your own, or you’re forced to make your own depending on your project model. Another way to put it, you actually own the components, and you get to harness your customization power on any component of your choice. This means that there is no more need to fight against the framework, and trying to figure out which classes need to be overridden in order to get results you initially aimed for.

Why Use Tailwind CSS?

Maybe you’re not quite ready to betray other frameworks yet, or you haven’t been convinced to embrace the goodies that come with Tailwind CSS. Allow me to give you a few reasons why you may want to consider Tailwind CSS.

NO NAMING CONVENTIONS

One of the most stressful parts of writing custom CSS is having to name classes. At every point, you’re pondering which class should be generic or specific. How do you organize them and ensure they’re cascaded? Tailwind CSS solves those problems seamlessly by providing utility-based classes that can be used all the time.

However, cases may arise where you need to name some classes. Sometimes this tends to happen when you need to extract certain components and use them later in your design (with the help of the @apply directives).

CACHE BENEFITS

When writing custom CSS (or using any other traditional CSS framework), you always have to make changes to your CSS files when making changes in your designs. With Tailwind CSS, you need not worry a bit about that since you’re using the same classes over and over again within the markup. This means that you do not have to bust your CSS cache everytime in order to make small changes to your design.

When Not To Use Tailwind CSS

Are you saying I should always use Tailwind CSS for every project? Of course not! There are a few use cases where you may not want to use Tailwind CSS.

IF YOU’RE WORKING ON A SMALL PROJECTS

When you need to get started with a mini-project that has a very short deadline (especially something a few users would be using or only yourself), then Tailwind CSS is not the best option. In those cases, I’d recommend using Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework instead. That’s because they come with predefined ready-to-use components (themes to get started with). With Tailwind CSS, you have to creatively create your own.

IF YOU’RE A CSS BEGINNER

Before diving into Tailwind CSS for any project, its advisable to know CSS. Beginners that desire to use Tailwind CSS for web-based projects should first master CSS to a certain degree. It provides utility classes that are linked to the underlying CSS, therefore, only those with a solid knowledge of CSS can easily build with it.

IF YOU DISLIKE ADDING A LOT OF CLASSES TO YOUR ELEMENTS

When writing Tailwind CSS, you always have to write lots of classes, which makes your codebase (HTML) look busy and sometimes difficult to read. If you prefer keeping your code neat, you may want to consider writing custom CSS or use any other CSS framework (such as Bootstrap).

With these reasons, it’s about time to move over to the business of the day: let’s set up Tailwind CSS in a React project together!

Getting Started

To set up our project, we’ll scaffold a new React app using create-react-app. If you have already done this, skip this process, otherwise, run the command below:

npx create-react-app react-tailwindcss && cd react-tailwindcss

Next, we install a few development dependencies. You can use any of the options that work for you.

USING NPM

npm install tailwindcss postcss-cli autoprefixer@9.8.6 -D

USING YARN

yarn add tailwindcss postcss-cli autoprefixer -D

We need to initialize Tailwind CSS by creating the default configurations. Type the command below in your terminal:

npx tailwind init tailwind.js --full

This command creates a tailwind.js in your project’s base directory; the file contains the configuration, such as our colors, themes, media queries, and so on. It’s a useful file that helps with predefined sets of properties which will aid the need to re-brand certain conventions or properties if the need arises.

How To Configure PostCSS?

The PostCSS documentation states that:

“PostCSS is a tool for transforming styles with JS plugins. These plugins can lint your CSS, support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.”

WHY AUTOPREFIXER?

It’s necessary to install Autoprefixer alongside Tailwind CSS because Autoprefixer usually tracks caniuse.com to see which CSS properties need to be prefixed. Hence, Tailwind CSS does not provide any vendor prefixing. If you’re curious as a cat in regards to PostCSS navigate to their documentation.

Create a PostCSS configuration file in your base directory manually or using the command:

touch postcss.config.js

Add the following lines of code to your PostCSS file:

const tailwindcss = require('tailwindcss');
module.exports = {
    plugins: [
        tailwindcss('./tailwind.js'),
        require('autoprefixer')
    ],
};

Because PostCSS is necessary to lint our CSS, hence this configuration.

CODE STEPS

• We fetched the Tailwind CSS package and placed it in a variable.
• We wrapped tailwind.js (our default base configuration) in our tailwindcss variable.
• We fetched the autoprefixer package.

How To Inject Tailwind’s Components, Utilities And Base Styles To Your App

Inside your src folder create a folder, name it assets, this is where all your styles would be stored. In that folder, create a tailwind.css file and main.css file respectively. The tailwind.css file will be used by us to import Tailwind CSS styles, and for custom configurations and rules. The main.css will hold the styles that are generated as a result of what we have in the tailwind.css file.

Next, we need to import the base styles and configurations. We will do that in one of the CSS files we created above. Add the following to your tailwind.css file.

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Note that we used the @tailwind directive to inject Tailwind’s base, components, and utilities styles into our CSS:

• @tailwind base
  This injects Tailwind’s base styles, which is a combination of Normalize.css and some additional base styles.
• Note: If you’d like to get the complete references of all the styles applied by Preflight, see this stylesheet.
• @tailwind components
  This injects any component (reusable styles like cards and form elements, etc.) classes registered by plugins based in our config file.
• @tailwind utilities
  This injects all of Tailwind’s utility classes(including the default and your own utilities) they are generated based on our config file.

Tailwind CSS will swap these directives out at build time with all of its generated CSS. If you’re using postcss-import, use this instead:

@import "tailwindcss/base";
@import "tailwindcss/components";
@import "tailwindcss/utilities";

How To Configure Your App To Build Your CSS

Next, we need to configure our project to build our CSS styles each time we run either the npm start or yarn start command.

Open your package.json file and use the snippet below in place of the script part of your package.json file:

"scripts": {
  "start": "npm run watch:css && react-scripts start",
  "build": "npm run watch:css && react-scripts build",
  "test": "react-scripts test",
  "eject": "react-scripts eject",
  "watch:css": "postcss src/assets/tailwind.css -o src/assets/main.css"
}

Importing Our CSS

We need to import our CSS file appropriately to ensure that it’s properly watched and built when we run yarn start or npm start.

Open your index.js file and make the following changes:

1. Import our main.css file and delete import './index.css';.

import './assets/main.css'

Your *index.js* should look like this after the changes:

import React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import './assets/main.css';
import App from "./App";
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById("root"));
import React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import './assets/main.css';
import App from "./App";
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById("root"));

ThankYou