Sapper + Svelte + tailwindcss boilerplate

Last week I wrote an article about some things I loved about Svelte after trying it for the first time:

Article No Longer Available

Although I think Svelte could be the next big thing in web development, it's a UI framework. That means you won't find features like server-side rendering, advance routing, offline support, prefetching content and more.

Sapper to the rescue 🥳

Sapper is a framework for building web applications of all sizes, with a beautiful development experience and flexible filesystem-based routing.

Unlike single-page apps, Sapper doesn't compromise on SEO, progressive enhancement or the initial load experience — but unlike traditional server-rendered apps, navigation is instantaneous for that app-like feel.
Btw, it's powered by Svelte.

If you want to read more about Sapper, follow this link

After reading about Sapper, I decided to clone the sapper-template repo to start playing with it.

Tailwindcss integration

If you read my last articles, you'll know I'm obsessed with tailwindcss 🤣. I've been using it for two years and I think there is no way back (at least at the moment). So, the first thing I thought after cloning Sapper was: I cannot use this without tailwind

TL;DR

I made a ready-to-use sapper-tailwindcss boilerplate repo on github.

mauro-codes / sapper-tailwindcss-boilerplate

Sapper boilerplate including tailwindcss integration with purgeCSS

sapper-template working with tailwindcss

The default Sapper template, available for Rollup and webpack.

Getting started

Using degit

degit is a scaffolding tool that lets you create a directory from a branch in a repository. Use either the rollup or webpack branch in sapper-template:

# for Rollup
npx degit "sveltejs/sapper-template#rollup" my-app
# for webpack
npx degit "sveltejs/sapper-template#webpack" my-app

Using GitHub templates

Alternatively, you can use GitHub's template feature with the sapper-template-rollup or sapper-template-webpack repositories.

Running the project

However you get the code, you can install dependencies and run the project in development mode with:

cd my-app
npm install # or yarn
npm run dev

Open up localhost:3000 and start clicking around.

Consult sapper.svelte.dev for help getting started.

Structure

Sapper expects to find two directories in the root of your project — src and static.

src

The src directory contains the entry points for your app…

View on GitHub

In case you want to do it by yourself instead of cloning the repo, here are the required steps to integrate tailwindcss in you sapper-template repo.

1 - Setup repo, tailwind dependencies and scripts

The first thing you should do is clone the sapper-boilerplate repo and run the application:

npx degit "sveltejs/sapper-template#rollup" my-app
cd my-app
npm install
npm run dev

Open your browser and visit http://localhost:3000 to see if the application is working as expected:

Install the required dependencies for tailwind:

npm i @fullhuman/postcss-purgecss postcss-cli tailwindcss -D

Then, add the following scripts in your package.json:

"watch:tailwind": "postcss static/tailwind.css -o static/index.css -w",
"build:tailwind": "NODE_ENV=production postcss static/tailwind.css -o static/index.css"

This additional scripts will be required in orden to make sure we're builing our tailwindcss utilities before building our project for production. With this scripts, all the unused tailwind utilities will be purged from our index.css to drastically reduce our bundle size.

Finally, change your build script like this:

"build": "npm run build:tailwind && sapper build"

2 - Setup PostCSS and Tailwind

Add the following files in your root directory

tailwind.js

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {}
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: []
}

postcss.config.js

const tailwindcss = require("tailwindcss");

const purgecss = require("@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss")({
    content: ["./src/**/*.svelte", "./src/**/*.html"],
    defaultExtractor: content => content.match(/[A-Za-z0-9-_:/]+/g) || []
});

module.exports = {
    plugins: [
        tailwindcss("./tailwind.js"),

        ...(process.env.NODE_ENV === "production" ? [purgecss] : [])
    ]
};

Finally, add a "tailwind.css" file within your /static directory:

tailwind.css

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

3 - Load tailwindcss utilities

In order to generate the tailwindcss utilities, run this command:

npm run build:tailwind

Finally, add the following link tag in your src/template.html file:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='index.css'>

That's it. Like I said above, I made a ready-to-use gitgub repo with all this work done and some additional svelte components like Nav and NavLink.

Final thoughts

It was SUPER FUN to play with Sapper and, in a couple of minutes, I managed to create two reusable components to handle my site navigation.

After building my app, the client-side bundle size was 32KB 🚀. This is awesome! (and to be honest, I'm not sure if I can do something else to further reduce this bundle size).

I'm really looking forward to see what Sapper has to offer in the next months and I'm definitely gonna keep playing with it and sharing my experiments.

---

What do you think about Sapper? Let me know in the comments below 👇

Comments

[Daniel Sokil]

Using cssnano is a good idea:

const tailwindcss = require("tailwindcss");

const cssnano = require("cssnano")({
  preset: "default"
});

const purgecss = require("@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss")({
  content: ["./src/**/*.svelte", "./src/**/*.html"],
  defaultExtractor: content => content.match(/[A-Za-z0-9-_:/]+/g) || []
});

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    tailwindcss("./tailwind.js"),
    ...(process.env.NODE_ENV === "production"
      ? [purgecss, cssnano]
      : [])
  ]
};

[Mauro Garcia]

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

[Andrei Sinitsa]

This is a big plus for Svelte framework, as well as appeared few days ago Svelte SSR + Cloudflare Workers integration demo.. Playing with Stencil now, another great way for building lightweight SSR apps, maybe more powerful... But these beautiful boilerplates will be my next step, thanks ;)

[Paweł Kowalski]

Im getting fluid in Tailwind and I dream about doing what you are doing - marrying Svelte, Sapper and Tailwind. One day... :)

[Mauro Garcia]

hahahahaah I heard someone say that we're getting pretty close to Dev Nirvana! hahaha

[Paweł Kowalski]

Heh, im pretty sure in 3 years we will be laughing at today, but compared to 200k+ bundles doing "Hello world" in react/angular+bootstrap ecosystem its still a huge progress ;-)

[Don Denton]

Finally, add a "tailwind.css" file within your src directory

src/static directory ;-)

Thank you so much for the post. Saved me tons of time!

[Mauro Garcia]

Oops :p fixed. Thanks!!

[bud parr]

Thank you for this, Mauro. I'm curious to know why you decided to run Tailwind as a separate process from the Sapper build via the Rollup plugin? If you tried it, did you slow up builds? And do you know if purgecss works well here?

[rshemant]

Hi Man, How to add live reload on CSS changes in Dev env.

"dev": "concurrently --kill-others \"yarn watch:tailwind\" \"sapper dev\""

I am using above code but the problem is when CSS changes swapper does not.

[Dmitry S.]

github.com/tailwindcss/setup-examp...
github.com/tailwindcss/setup-examp...

[Alejandro Sáez]

¡Thank you very much for this!
You make my life so easy with this repo.

[Mauro Garcia]

Thanks to you for that feedback! I'm thinking about updating that repo with additional tailwind components so stay tuned.

[Juan]

Thanks for the post, Mauro. Do you find Sapper a good use for behind login (non public-facing) business ERP-type web applications? Or is it too much extra complexity for little benefit?

[Mauro Garcia]

Hi Juan, to be totally honest... I didn't have the opportunity to use Sapper on big/complex projects yet so It's hard to know if there are problems but I think you should be able to build that kind of projects. The last months I've been doing a lot of iOS work and learning SWIFTUI so I wasn't able to keep doing experiments with Sapper 😔