Setup Bridgetown to use TailwindCSS

I’ve been using the Ruby powered static site generator: Bridgetown for a lot of things lately. If you don’t already know, here is the Bridgetown tagline:

A Webpack-aware, Ruby-powered static site generator for the modern Jamstack era.

I’m a Ruby on Rails fan and, TailwindCSS believer and I’m all in on TailwindUI. So naturally, I wanted to use this stack to build my site. Andrew Mason had a great writeup to setup Bridgetown with TailwindCSS, but for the life of me I couldn’t get TailwindCSS to build with those instructions. After getting things to work on my end, I think the difference was in the PostCSS and/or the index.scss file but I’m still not 100%. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Here is his detailed write up:

Since everything is working just fine today, I thought I’d write up my steps. This is assuming you have a Bridgetown site created and ready to go:

Note this is with [Bridgetown 0.17.1] (https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/releases/tag/v0.17.1)

1. yarn add …:

yarn add -D postcss autoprefixer postcss-import postcss-loader tailwindcss

It’s my understanding that postcss is a dependency of postcss-import and postcss-loader. So I didn’t need to call it out here, but I did anyway for verbosity when I was trying to get things working.

2. Create `tailwind.config.js`

Easiest way to do this: npx tailwindcss init

module.exports = {
  future: {
    // removeDeprecatedGapUtilities: true,
    // purgeLayersByDefault: true,
  },
  purge: [],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

3. Create `postcss.config.js`

Here is a copy of my postcss.config.js file. It was actually taken from an old Jekyll site doing the same thing. Seems to work. 🤷🏻‍♂️

const purgecss = require("@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss")({
  content: ["./src/**/*.html", "./src/**/*.md", "./src/**/*.liquid", "./frontend/**/*.js", "./src/_data/**/*.yml"],

  defaultExtractor: content => content.match(/[\w-/.:]+(?<!:)/g) || []
})

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    require("postcss-import", {
      path: "frontend/styles",
      plugins: []
    }),
    require("tailwindcss"),
    require("autoprefixer"),
    ...(process.env.NODE_ENV == "production" ? [purgecss] : [])
  ]
}

4. Update `webpack.config.js` to use postcss.

There is only one change I did and that was to add "postcss-loader" on line 56. Here is a full copy of the file for reference:

const path = require("path");
const MiniCssExtractPlugin = require("mini-css-extract-plugin");
const ManifestPlugin = require("webpack-manifest-plugin");

module.exports = {
  entry: "./frontend/javascript/index.js",
  devtool: "source-map",
  // Set some or all of these to true if you want more verbose logging:
  stats: {
    modules: false,
    builtAt: false,
    timings: false,
    children: false,
  },
  output: {
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, "output", "_bridgetown", "static", "js"),
    filename: "all.[contenthash].js",
  },
  resolve: {
    extensions: [".js", ".jsx"],
  },
  plugins: [
    new MiniCssExtractPlugin({
      filename: "../css/all.[contenthash].css",
    }),
    new ManifestPlugin({
      fileName: path.resolve(__dirname, ".bridgetown-webpack", "manifest.json"),
    }),
  ],
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.(js|jsx)/,
        use: {
          loader: "babel-loader",
          options: {
            presets: ["@babel/preset-env"],
            plugins: [
              ["@babel/plugin-proposal-decorators", { "legacy": true }],
              ["@babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties", { "loose" : true }],
              [
                "@babel/plugin-transform-runtime",
                {
                  helpers: false,
                },
              ],
            ],
          },
        },
      },
      {
        test: /\.(s[ac]|c)ss$/,
        use: [
          MiniCssExtractPlugin.loader,
          "css-loader",
          "postcss-loader",
          {
            loader: "sass-loader",
            options: {
              sassOptions: {
                includePaths: [
                  path.resolve(__dirname, "src/_components")
                ],
              },
            },
          },
        ],
      },
      {
        test: /\.woff2?$|\.ttf$|\.eot$|\.svg$/,
        loader: "file-loader",
        options: {
          outputPath: "../fonts",
          publicPath: "../fonts",
        },
      },
    ],
  },
};

5. Update the main stylesheet

frontend/styles/index.scss

@import "tailwindcss/base";
@import "tailwindcss/components";
@import "tailwindcss/utilities";

UPDATE:. I also had used the @tailwind in the config and it worked fine. I switched to the @import as I think that is the correct way when working with postcss-import (as detailed on the Tailwind site).

More details here

6. Start the server

yarn start.

🚀

6.5: If you are using TailwindUI, then simply follow the instructions on the site documentation. You’ll just be adding the `tailwindui` plugin as the instructions indicate.

That’s it. Enjoy!

Oh, just incase here is Bridgetown on Github:

Setup Bridgetown to use TailwindCSS

1. yarn add …:

2. Create tailwind.config.js

3. Create postcss.config.js

4. Update webpack.config.js to use postcss.