How to use TailwindCSS with ReactJs

In this article, You will learn how to use Tailwindcss in Reactjs. This process is not complicated when you do step by step.

Prerequisites

• basic understanding of Reactjs
• basic understanding in TailwindCSS

Step 1:
open a terminal or cmd and go to your project folder, then create react app using the following command

npx create-react-app myapp 

Then go to myapp in the terminal by using the command cd myapp

Step 2:
Now install the necessary dependencies for TailwindCSS.

 npm install -D tailwindcss@npm:@tailwindcss/postcss7-compat postcss-cli autoprefixer@^9

Here we use postcss-cli, because tailwind requires a CSS build process and step to run the build process we use postcss-cli. autoprefixer also needs our CSS build process. option -D means all the dependencies are development dependencies.

Step 3:
Open the project folder myapp in your favorite code editor. I preferred Vs Code. the open terminal in vs code. Then type the following command to create a full Tailwind configuration file for our project.

npx tailwind init --full

This command creates the tailwind.config.js file.

Step 4:
Now create a file as postcss.config.js. In this file, we going to specify our CSS build process.

NOTE: Both tailwind.config.js and postcss.config.js must be located in the root of our project folder.

Step 5:
Add the following lines in the postcss.config.js file.

module.exports = {
    plugins: [
        require('tailwindcss'),
        require('autoprefixer')
    ]
};                      

Step 6:
Create a folder as style in the src folder. Then create two more files in the style folder as follows.

• tailwind.css
• main.css

Step 7:
In the tailwind.css file add the following files of code. These are basic packages we need to use in our project

@tailwind base;

@tailwind components;

@tailwind utilities;

tailwind.css is an input file and main.css is an output file.

Step 8:
Open the package.json file and add the following scripts below the eject script. This script is used to build tailwind CSS.

"build:css": "postcss src/styles/tailwind.css -o src/styles/main.css"

Modify the start and build scripts as follows.

"start": "npm run build:css && react-scripts start"
"build": "npm run build:css && react-scripts build",

sample figure 1

Step 9:
We are in the final step to complete the TailwindCSS with reactjs setup!
Now you can import our main.css file into the App.js file. App.js is enough. no need to import main.css in every component.

import './styles/main.css';

One last step. Open the terminal in vs code, and type the following command to start build process

npm run build:css

now you can add tailwind classes to your components 🥳🥳

Start you react app server and Happy coding!

npm start

sample figure 2

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See you in my next Blog article, Take care!!

Reference :

• Tailwindcss doc
• React doc