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Denis Donici
Denis Donici

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Sveltekit & Tailwind CSS Combo

#svelte #tailwindcss #vite #ux

Hi friends. I've decided to share my setup process for a perfect project with Svelte & Tailwind. Maybe some of you will find it useful. For those who are not familiar, the Svelte and Tailwind are a perfect match for quick and enjoyable web development. However, before, we had to manually configure everything in Rollup. Not anymore, with just a couple of simple commands, you get, IMHO, the best UX ever. Tailwind has just come out with JIT (just in time compiler) that makes it very quick. Add to this the new SvelteKit and Vite and you have an enjoyable web-dev process! Here are the commands:

  • We create a new folder and change the working directory to it 
mkdir my-app
cd my-app
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  • Initialize a new SvleteKit project in the folder 
npm init svelte@next
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  • Add the static adapter so we can build and export static files 
npm i -D @sveltejs/adapter-static
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  • Add Tailwind with JIT 
npx svelte-add tailwindcss  --jit
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  • Install all the dependencies 
npm i
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  • Run the development server

npm run dev

One thing to notice that in order to build static files we will need to modify a bit the svelte.config.cjs file in the root folder of the project.

Instead of

const node = require('@sveltejs/adapter-node');
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We need to import this

const static = require('@sveltejs/adapter-static');
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and also instead of the default node adapter

adapter: node(),
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we will need to add the static adapter like this

adapter: {
 adapt: static
        },
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After

npm run build
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in build folder, you'll find the files that could be uploaded to your CDN of choice for free hosting, like Vercel, Surge or Cloudflare. I hope it helps, my friends! Happy development!

Top comments (4)

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chenxeed profile image
Albert Mulia Shintra •

Hi, thanks for the combo guidelines!

I have followed the steps above and in my case, I need to do two more steps.

  • Inside svelte.config.js, import/require the tailwind & autoprefixer and add it to the postcss
  • In the Svelte template, add the style to import tailwind: 
<style global lang="postcss">
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;
</style>
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I've made a boilerplate so I can refer it and reuse when needed. Hope it helps.

github.com/chenxeed/svelte-tailwin...

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ekanna profile image
ekanna •

One more step before

npx svelte-add tailwindcss --jit

is

npm install -D @tailwindcss/jit tailwindcss postcss

Nice article. Thanks

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babichjacob profile image
Jacob Babich •

Not true. You are supposed to install dependencies after the command runs with npm install or pnpm install or yarn.

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gevera profile image
Denis Donici •

Fixed that. Thanks

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