Using Tailwind CSS in Next.js
Explore how to integrate Tailwind CSS into Next.js applications, including configuration of key files like tailwind.config.js and postcss.config.js. Learn to apply utility-first classes directly in JSX for rapid styling, understand the mobile-first responsive design approach with breakpoints, and create optimized CSS bundles through Next.js and Tailwind's purging process. This lesson equips you to build custom, responsive components and style interfaces effectively within the Next.js framework.
Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework. Instead of writing CSS rules in a separate file, we apply preexisting utility classes directly to our JSX. This allows us to rapidly build custom designs without leaving our component files.
It might seem unusual at first, but this approach excels at keeping styles colocated with their components, simplifying responsive design, and ensuring our final production CSS is as small as possible.
Let’s see how we can integrate this into our App Router workflow.
Understanding the configuration
In a real-world project, Tailwind CSS doesn’t work out of the box; it needs to be configured. In our preconfigured environment, two key files handle this for us: tailwind.config.js and postcss.config.js. It’s important to understand what they do.
1. The tailwind.config.js file
This is Tailwind’s main configuration file. Its most critical property is the content array, which tells Tailwind which files to scan for utility classes.
module.exports = {content: ['./src/app/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}','./src/components/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}',],theme: {extend: {},},plugins: [],};
By scanning these files, Tailwind knows exactly which classes we’ve used so it can generate a highly optimized CSS file containing only what’s needed for our project.
We can also use this file to customize our design system, like adding custom colors or fonts to the theme object.
2. The postcss.config.js file
Next.js uses a tool called ...