Originally posted on divrhino.com
Tailwind is a utility CSS library that has been gaining a lot of popularity in the past few years. Utility libraries are great because you won't end up fighting against a framework when it comes to building your own custom designs. And with Tailwind, you can build your sites faster because you won't be jumping between your HTML and CSS all the time. In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to add TailwindCSS to a Hugo project.
Prerequisites
To follow along with this tutorial, you will need to have Hugo and NodeJS installed
Installation guides:
Creating Hugo project and theme
Let's start by creating a new project. Navigation into the directory where you keep all your projects, and run the command to create a new hugo site. We're going to name our site "hugotails".
cd Sites
hugo new site hugotails
Then change directories into our new "hugotails" site and create a new theme. We will call the theme "windytheme".
cd hugotails
hugo new theme windytheme
Initialising NPM and installing dependencies
Now that we've got our hugo site all ready to go, let's install tailwind. To follow along with this section of the tutorial, you will need to have Nodejs installed. So if you haven't installed it already, you might want to do so before continuing.
Make sure you're in the "hugotails" project root because we will be initialising NPM here. We can run the npm init
command with the --yes
flag so we don't have to go through all the setup questions.
After this command is successfully run, we will have a newly-created package.json
in our project root.
npm init --yes
Now that our project has been initialised with NPM, we can go ahead and install the necessary packages. Run:
npm install --save-dev autoprefixer postcss postcss-cli postcss-import tailwindcss
We are passing in the -save-dev
flag because we want to save these packages as dev dependencies.
If you noticed, we aren't just installing the tailwind package, we have a few other accompanying packages. Below is a brief description of what each of them are for:
-
Postcss
- a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript. -
postcss-cli
- the command-line tool we can use to execute Postcss commands in the terminal -
postcss-import
- used to resolve the path of an @import rule -
autoprefixer
- helps us add vendor prefixes to our CSS -
tailwindcss
- a library of utility classes to help us build unique custom layouts without doing too much
Setting up config files
Next up, we will tell our site to use our new windytheme
theme, by adding the following line to our hugotails/config.toml
file:
...
theme = "windytheme"
Now we can move onto adding tailwind as a PostCSS plugin. Since we're working with a brand new theme, we don't have a css
directory yet. Let's create one. Running mkdir with the -p
flag will create nested directories if they don't already exist.
mkdir -p themes/windytheme/assets/css/
Next we need to create configuration files for both PostCSS and tailwind. We will also need a main styles.scss
file:
touch themes/windytheme/assets/css/postcss.config.js
touch themes/windytheme/assets/css/tailwind.config.js
touch themes/windytheme/assets/css/styles.scss
Let's tackle the postcss config first. Open up the postcss.config.js
file
const themeDir = __dirname + '/../../';
module.exports = {
plugins: [
require('postcss-import')({
path: [themeDir]
}),
require('tailwindcss')(themeDir + 'assets/css/tailwind.config.js'),
require('autoprefixer')({
path: [themeDir]
}),
]
}
Phew, that was a lot. But we're not done yet, let's head over to our tailwind.config.js
and add a basic configuration file for TailwindCSS:
const themeDir = __dirname + '/../../';
module.exports = {
content: [
`${themeDir}/layouts/**/*.html`,
`${themeDir}/content/**/*.md`
],
theme: {
extend: {}
},
variants: {},
plugins: []
}
Updating styles.scss
Now we have to include the necessary tailwind imports in our stylesheet. Open up our stylesheet, styles.scss
, and add the following imports:
@import "node_modules/tailwindcss/base";
@import "node_modules/tailwindcss/components";
@import "node_modules/tailwindcss/utilities";
Importing CSS in head tag
When we created our new theme, Hugo helped us out by creating some starting templates files. One of these starter files is the head.html
partial.
{{ $time := now }}
{{ $styles := resources.Get "css/styles.scss"
| toCSS
| postCSS (dict "config" "./assets/css/postcss.config.js")
| resources.ExecuteAsTemplate (printf "styles.%s.css" $time) $time
}}
{{ if .Site.IsServer }}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $styles.RelPermalink }}">
{{ else }}
{{ $styles := $styles | minify | fingerprint | resources.PostCSS }}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $styles.RelPermalink }}">
{{ end }}
So what's going on in our code above? Let's go over it line-by-line:
-
{{ $time := now }}
- Weβre getting the current time so we can use to bust our cache in local development -
$styles := resources.Get "css/styles.scss"
- We got our stylesheet as a resource and stored it in a variable called styles -
| toCSS
- We used Hugo pipes to first convert the SCSS file to CSS, so the browser can understand it -
| postCSS (dict "config" "./assets/css/postcss.config.js")
- We point to where our PostCSS config file lives -
| resources.ExecuteAsTemplate (printf "styles.%s.css" $time) $time
- We execute our stylesheet as a template so we can append a timestamp to the end of the filename - We're going to check if we're in our local dev environment by using the IsServer variable, if we are, we will link to the stylesheets relative URL
- However, if we're in a production environment, we're going to use Hugo Pipes to minify our css file
- We also want to pipe it through fingerprint so that we know the asset has not been tampered with. This also has a nice side-effect of cache-busting, so we also know we're serving the latest version
Testing some TailwindCSS classes
We've set up all the configuration we need. Now let's set up our index
page too. This file can be found at themes/windytheme/layouts/index.html
.
{{ define "main" }}
{{ .Content }}
{{ end }}
Now we can imported our styles and transformed them in a few useful ways, let's see if everything actually works.
Let's create a basic header in the themes/windytheme/layouts/partials/header.html
file:
<header>
<h1>Welcome to HugoTails!</h1>
</header>
While still in themes/windytheme/layouts/partials/header.html
, let's add some tailwind utility classes:
<header class="w-full bg-red-300">
<h1 class="text-center">Welcome to HugoTails!</h1>
</header>
We should also start our Hugo server:
hugo server
Open your browser and visit http://localhost:1313, you should be able to see your changes there.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learnt how to add tailwindcss to your hugo site using Hugo Pipes. If you enjoyed this article and you'd like more, consider following Div Rhino on YouTube.
Congratulations, you did great. Keep learning and keep coding!
divrhino / hugotails
Add TailwindCSS to Your Hugo Site. Video tutorial available on the Div Rhino YouTube channel.
π Gettings up and running
- Run
npm install
to get all your node packages installed - Run
hugo
to build - Run
hugo serve
to get the server up - Visit http://localhost:1313/ to see site
Versions
- Hugo v0.79.0
- Node v14.15.3
Caveats
- This is only tested for MacOS, so I'm not sure how to troubleshoot for Linux or Windows π
Companion resources
- Text Tutorial: https://divrhino.com/articles/add-tailwindcss-to-hugo/
- Video Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hr19zVHCbo
Top comments (9)
Thanks for this write-up! This is helping me work through Hugo pipes with Tailwind CSS β₯οΈ
Small discrepancy with this note:
From what I've read,
integrity
is a security feature to make sure static resources haven't been tampered with, e.x. loading a JavaScript library from a cross-origin CDN. This may have cache-busting qualities, I'm not sure. Could you clarify?Now that I've got Tailwind styles building and rendering (yay! and your article helped πͺπ»), time to purge! The un-optimized stylesheet is 5.95MB π±. Previous setup made it under 3KB.
(Still working through it, would love to swap notes! Will be starting a new branch on my personal site repo: gitlab.com/littleninja/sarahgrefal...)
Cool, thanks for sharing the link to your branch.
Do you have any specific ideas in mind that you'd like swap notes on?
Thanks a lot Sarah for raising this, I wouldn't have seen this coming before reading your comment.
I would really appreciate if you have any tips on how to optimise and purge this CSS bundle.
This is my very first day with Hugo and I'm feeling so lost, can't come up with any ideas yet on how to optimise this particular CSS bundle.
Hello Kareem,
Although you've directed your comment above to Sarah, I thought I'd interject with some tips that may be helpful. Firstly, optimising CSS in this instance probably has more to do with TailwindCSS than with Hugo. So here are just a few things that have helped me:
PurgeCSS
in yourtailwind.config
.floats
. So being able to remove floats and similar features is very handy.The tailwind docs have more useful optimisations.
Hope this is a useful starting point. :) π
This is a useful starting point! To add, the official Hugo docs show how to purge CSS with PostProcess. I was able to optimize my Tailwind styles without modifying the Tailwind config, but Div Rhino's suggestions can help you optimize further.
Here are the steps in code. These details are also in the link above to the Hugo docs:
First, in your config file:
Next, in your PostCSS config file:
Lastly, in your layout file (
layouts/_default/baseOf.html
or a style partial):To walk through what's happening here:
writeStats = true
. If successful, this will write ahugo_stats.json
file at the root of your theme or site.hugo_stats.json
and glob patterns to find your layout files to optimize Tailwind styles.resources.PostProcess
in the layout file where you define your styles.Hello Sarah,
Thank you for your comment. Yes, you are correct. The proper role of
fingerprint
is to ensure the resources have not been tampered with when they are being served.However, in our case, we assume the assets are all being hosted on the same server, so a simple refresh could ensure we're getting the correct asset (i.e. no middle person intercepting it first).
Cache-busting is a nice side-effect, though. But I do see how the wording in the article makes it look like it is the main function. I will update the content to reflect your point. <3
Hi,
Thank you for this write-up. It's very helpful.
FYI: I was getting a blank page after implementing the instructions. While reading through forums to figure it out, someone said Hugo had a problem with comments at the top of some files. I deleted the comment at the top of the index.html file and then it worked fine. I tried this on another system and the same thing happened - except I also needed to take out the top comment in header.html.
This is Hugo v0.80. I'm not sure what is going on here, but thought maybe others would like to know about it.
Thanks again!
Hello Robert, thank you for adding this comment! <3 I'll look into this and either add version numbers or update the instructions to reflect your comments.
I probably missed it because I had added the comments at the top of code snippets of this article for clarity, but hadn't actually added any into the accompanying code repo. I'll move those into the article text, so others don't run into the same issue you did.