I've recently had some fun playing around with Next.js but never really documented any of my learnings.
So let's go back to the basics and set up a basic Next.js application that uses Tailwind.css!
Setting up Next.js
First of all, let's set up Next.js, which is easy as we need to have node.js installed.
Then run the following command in your terminal.
npx create-next-app
Follow the steps it prompts.
If you want to start with a Typescript version, use the following command.
npx create-next-app --ts
By now, we already have half the work done and a basic Next.js app is running. We can see it in action by running: npm run dev.
Adding Tailwind CSS to a Next.js application
However, let's not stop there and add Tailwind CSS to the mix. Tailwind is so easy for basic styling and can help us get started quickly.
To installed Tailwind in our Next.js app, we first need to install the dependencies:
npm install -D tailwindcss@latest postcss@latest autoprefixer@latest
Then let's add our config files by running:
npx tailwindcss init -p
This creates a tailwind.config.js file as well as a posts.config.js file.
Open up the tailwind.config.js file and the purge for our Next.js files.
purge: ['./pages/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}', './components/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}'],
You can also enable Tailwind JIT mode if you like.
mode: 'jit',
Then we simply have to add our Tailwind base styles to our styles/globals.css file.
@import 'tailwindcss/base';
@import 'tailwindcss/components';
@import 'tailwindcss/utilities';
And let's add a basic card template in our pages/index.js file:
<div className="flex min-h-screen justify-center items-center">
<head>
<title>Create Next App</title>
<meta name="description" content="Generated by create next app" />
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
</head>
<div className="max-w-xs rounded overflow-hidden shadow-lg my-2">
<img
className="w-full"
src="https://tailwindcss.com/img/card-top.jpg"
alt="Sunset in the mountains"
/>
<div className="px-6 py-4">
<div className="font-bold text-xl mb-2">Next + Tailwind ❤️</div>
<p className="text-grey-darker text-base">
Next and Tailwind CSS are a match made in heaven, check out this article on how
you can combine these two for your next app.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
If you now re-run the application, we should see a card like this show up in the browser.
Are you interested in seeing the complete code? You can view it on GitHub.
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Top comments (5)
even after reading 2 articles I still don't know why I should want this 🤔
If you never needed custom CSS in a Tailwind application you needed JIT.
If you are fine with all the classes from Tailwind and don't need custom add-ons you are fine not using it.
It's just a quicker way to add custom CSS for a single component.
Thanks for the nice explanation! JIT then looks like a lot of win to me.
I hope all the kinks get ironed out so it's not a seperate library anymore.Just saw that it's part of the core repo since v2.1 💪Could use this if I decide to try Tailwind 😉 Is it your default styling solution by now? 👀
It actually is yes!
I find Tailwind so helpful, and don't get me wrong I could do all this with Vanilla CSS, but I prefer the speed that tailwind brings.