{"data":{"markdownRemark":{"frontmatter":{"title":"Steps to setup TailwindCSS with Create React App using POSTCSS","date":"January 2019"},"timeToRead":3,"html":"

Originally posted on Medium

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Other blog/Medium posts directly tell you to eject from create-react-app, but that’s not needed. Also they don’t discuss about production setup, that’s why I have written this post.

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TLDR: You can directly pull the setup from here.

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  1. \n

    Make a React app using create-react-app

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    Install Tailwind and PostCSS CLI with

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npm i -D tailwindcss postcss-cli
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    Make a Tailwind config using npx tailwind init or ./node_modules/.bin/tailwind init. This command creates tailwind.js at root of your project. NPX comes installed alongwith NodeJS and NPM.

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    Now create postcss.config.js file at root of your project and write the following

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const tailwindcss = require('tailwindcss');\n\nmodule.exports = {\n  plugins: [\n    tailwindcss('./tailwind.js')\n  ]\n}
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  1. In src/ create tailwind-own.css and write this
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@tailwind preflight;\n@tailwind components;\n@tailwind utilities;
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  1. Import “./tailwind.css” (not “./tailwind-own.css”) in your index.js. As code with @tailwind in tailwind-own.css is not valid CSS, we will use POSTCSS to transform this tailwind-own.css to valid CSS in tailwind.css which will then be imported and used by React app.
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import './tailwind.css';
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  1. Change your scripts of package.json to include command which runs POSTCSS in watch mode. In the code below, start:tw takes in src/tailwind-own.css and outputs src/tailwind.css which contains valid CSS, and as you have imported tailwind.css in your index.js, you will get all Tailwind utility classes. -w in start:tw enables watch mode, so it will watch for any changes in tailwind-own.css and will remake tailwind.css accordingly.
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\"scripts\": {\n    \"start:tw\": \"postcss ./src/tailwind-own.css -o ./src/tailwind.css -w\",\n    \"start\": \"react-scripts start\",\n    \"build\": \"react-scripts build\",\n    \"test\": \"react-scripts test --env=jsdom\",\n    \"eject\": \"react-scripts eject\"\n  },
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  1. Now run your app. You will need two different commands, one to start up POSTCSS in watch mode using start:tw and and other to run React app as usual.
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npm run start:tw
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npm start
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  1. Use any of Tailwind’s utility classes and it’ll work! 🎉
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Setup for production

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Try running npm run build. You’ll see 35KB+ of CSS being generated even if you have used two classes or so.

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We will use PurgeCSS to strip all unused CSS. Install it with

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npm i -D @fullhuman/postcss-purgecss
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Now change your postcss.config.js which you had created to include code which removes unused CSS for production.

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const tailwindcss = require('tailwindcss');\nconst purgecss = require('@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss');\n\nmodule.exports = {\n  plugins: [\n    tailwindcss('./tailwind.js'),\n    process.env.NODE_ENV===\"production\" &&  purgecss({\n      content: ['./src/**/*.js'],\n      css: ['./src/**/*.css'],\n    })\n  ]\n}
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content denotes the places where you have used CSS classes.

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Also add this line in “scripts” of your package.json

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\"build:tw\": \"postcss ./src/tailwind-own.css -o ./src/tailwind.css --env production\"
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Now to build it for production, we first need to run

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npm run build:tw
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which creates stripped tailwind.css and then we will run

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npm run build
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to get out our production files.

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Now look at CSS bundle size. It will be a few KBs or so. Nice.

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As said at starting of this post, if you don’t want to setup all this you can go to this repo and download React app which has all this pre-configured.

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