Tailwindcss: Fall in Love with Writing CSS Again for your Django Application

If you're a developer, chances are that you've been in this situation before. You're writing CSS for your Django app, and it's not really coming naturally to you. The code is looking sloppy and unorganized, so the whole project looks like a mess! That's where Tailwindcss comes in handy: You can start using Tailwindcss to write clean and organized CSS for your Django application and forget about messy CSS for the rest of your life!

In this post, we are going to see how you can install Tailwindcss for your Django application.

Create a new Django application

• Create new virtualenv and activate the environment

virtualenv -p python3 tailwindcss && source tailwindcss/bin/activate

• Install Django

pip3 install django

• Create a new project and core folder

django-admin startproject mysite && cd mysite && python3 manage.py startapp core

• Make sure your site runs properly

python3 manage.py runserver

• Create static directory

mkdir static && mkdir static/css

• Create a folder for JS

mkdir jstools && cd jstools

Install and setup tailwind

• Make sure you are in jstools folder

npm init -y && npm install tailwindcss autoprefixer clean-css-cli && npx tailwindcss init -p

• Add build command to your scripts Open package.json file and change the scripts section to following

  "scripts": {
    "build": "tailwind build ../static/css/tailwind.css -o ../static/css/style.css && cleancss -o ../static/css/style.min.css ../static/css/style.css",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },

• Open the tailwind.config.js and paste the following in it

module.exports = {
    future: {
        removeDeprecatedGapUtilities: true,
        purgeLayersByDefault: true,
    },
    purge: {
        enabled: false, //true for production build
        content: [
            '../**/templates/*.html',
            '../**/templates/**/*.html'
        ]
    },
    theme: {
        extend: {},
    },
    variants: {},
    plugins: [],
}

• In static/css* create new file called tailwind.css and add the following in it

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

• Now go to jstools directory and run:

npm run build

This generates styles.css and styles.min.css

• In your template link to styles.min.css and voilà you have tailwind in your project

<link href="${static.url('css/style.min.css')}" rel="stylesheet">