Gatsby Tailwind Theme

A Gatsby theme to use tailwindcss.

Demo site

Summary

This theme installs:

• Tailwindcss
• gatsby-plugin-postcss
• Emotion (CSS in JS)

Tailwindcss and postcss are required to have tailwind properly working, emotion is installed because it is very common to use a CSS in JS framework and I think it is useful to have emotion and tailwind installed and configured to work together.

Installation

Manually add to your site

npm install --save gatsby-theme-tailwindcss

or

yarn add gatsby-theme-tailwindcss

Usage

Add Tailwind to your CSS

As stated on its official documentation, inject Tailwind’s styles using the @tailwind directive:

@tailwind base;

@tailwind components;

@tailwind utilities;

You should write these 3 directives either on a css you are importing or creating a new .css file and importing it.

I recommend creating a globals.css file for example in a utils folder and use it for tailwind loading directives and later extracting CSS components and / or other customisations if needed.

├── gatsby-config.js
├── node_modules
├── package.json
└── src
    ├── pages
    │   └── index.js
    └── utils
        └── globals.css

NOTE: If you experience a FOUC (flash of unstyled content) when first loading pages, import the above mentioned .css file on gatsby-browser.js, like this:

//gatsby-browser.js
import "./src/utils/globals.css"

Configuration

Add a tailwind.config.js file at the root of your project folder in order to use the tailwind.macro for CSS in JS and to be able to customise the tailwind base styles and modifiers.

yarn tailwind init

or

npx tailwindcss init

Theme options

This theme is using gatsby-plugin-postcss under the hood, so you can pass in any options you would to the actual postcss plugin (postCssPlugins and cssLoaderOptions)

NOTE: using a postcss.config.js file is not supported, you have to use the options: {} object of the theme.

Example usage

The only plugin included as default is the actual tailwindcss required to work, but I do recommend using the autoprefixer and purgeCSS plugins too.

With autoprefixer

(See it in action in the demo site)

// gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-theme-tailwindcss`,
      options: {
        postCssPlugins: [require("autoprefixer")],
      },
    },
  ],
}

With purgeCSS

(See it in action in the demo site)

Use the official gatsby plugin gatsby-plugin-purgecss

For more detailed info, visit the official docs at tailwindcss docs