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Sampson Ovuoba for Devwares

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How to create Tailwind CSS dropdown

Creating a Tailwind CSS dropdowns is much easier than creating it on normal CSS. Dropdowns are very important for responsive websites and applications. It is also vital when you want to organize a lot of pages in your web applications. In this article we will look at how to create a Tailwind CSS dropdown menu.

Table of content

  • Installing Tailwind CSS
  • Building Tailwind CSS dropdown
  • Conclusion

Installing Tailwind CSS

We have to install Tailwind CSS before we can start building our Tailwind CSS dropdown menu. There are many ways you can do this. You can check our post here to understand it better.

Building Tailwind CSS dropdown

Creating the web page for the dropdown menu is the first step. Then we can go ahead to add the following code to our HTML page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Drop down meanu</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
  </head>
  <body></body>
</html>
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In the code above, we added the link to the Tailwind CSS stylesheet file. Which we have already installed and set up as the style.css file.

At this stage we can go ahead to build the dropdown menu. Our Tailwind CSS dropdown menu code is written below.

<div class="flex justify-center h-screen">
    <div x-data="{ dropdownOpen: true }" class="relative my-32">
        <button @click="dropdownOpen = !dropdownOpen"
            class="relative z-10 block rounded-md bg-white p-2 focus:outline-none bg-blue-600 bg-blue-600 text-gray-200 rounded-lg px-6 text-sm py-3 overflow-hidden focus:outline-none focus:border-white">Dropdown
            <svg class="h-5 w-5 text-gray-800" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 20 20"
                fill="currentColor">
                <path fill-rule="evenodd"
                    d="M5.293 7.293a1 1 0 011.414 0L10 10.586l3.293-3.293a1 1 0 111.414 1.414l-4 4a1 1 0 01-1.414 0l-4-4a1 1 0 010-1.414z"
                    clip-rule="evenodd" />
            </svg>
        </button>

        <div x-show="dropdownOpen" @click="dropdownOpen = false" class="fixed inset-0 h-full w-full z-10"></div>

        <div x-show="dropdownOpen" class="absolute right-0 mt-2 py-2 w-48 bg-white rounded-md shadow-xl z-20">
            <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white">
                your profile
            </a>
            <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white">
                Your projects
            </a>
            <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white">
                Help
            </a>
            <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white">
                Settings
            </a>
            <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white">
                Sign Out
            </a>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/alpinejs/alpine@v2.x.x/dist/alpine.min.js" defer></script>
</body>
</html>
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In the code above, we had the dropdown menu set up along with the necessary Tailwind CSS classes.

Our entire code will look like the code below

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Drop down meanu</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="flex justify-center h-screen">
      <div x-data="{ dropdownOpen: true }" class="relative my-32">
        <button
          @click="dropdownOpen = !dropdownOpen"
          class="relative z-10 block rounded-md bg-white p-2 focus:outline-none bg-blue-600 bg-blue-600 text-gray-200 rounded-lg px-6 text-sm py-3 overflow-hidden focus:outline-none focus:border-white"
        >
          Dropdown
          <svg
            class="h-5 w-5 text-gray-800"
            xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
            viewBox="0 0 20 20"
            fill="currentColor"
          >
            <path
              fill-rule="evenodd"
              d="M5.293 7.293a1 1 0 011.414 0L10 10.586l3.293-3.293a1 1 0 111.414 1.414l-4 4a1 1 0 01-1.414 0l-4-4a1 1 0 010-1.414z"
              clip-rule="evenodd"
            />
          </svg>
        </button>

        <div
          x-show="dropdownOpen"
          @click="dropdownOpen = false"
          class="fixed inset-0 h-full w-full z-10"
        ></div>

        <div
          x-show="dropdownOpen"
          class="absolute right-0 mt-2 py-2 w-48 bg-white rounded-md shadow-xl z-20"
        >
          <a
            href="#"
            class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white"
          >
            your profile
          </a>
          <a
            href="#"
            class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white"
          >
            Your projects
          </a>
          <a
            href="#"
            class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white"
          >
            Help
          </a>
          <a
            href="#"
            class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white"
          >
            Settings
          </a>
          <a
            href="#"
            class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm capitalize text-gray-800 hover:bg-indigo-500 hover:text-white"
          >
            Sign Out
          </a>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <script
      src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/alpinejs/alpine@v2.x.x/dist/alpine.min.js"
      defer
    ></script>
  </body>
</html>
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The Tailwind CSS dropdown menu will like the images below.

Dropdown

Conclusion

The Tailwind CSS dropdown menu will certainly come in handy when building some navigation for your web applications. In this article, we explored an example on how to build a Tailwind CSS dropdown menu with Tailwind CSS.

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