I saw the tweet below on my timeline today:
Catalin Pit@catalinmpit
I'm so glad I did a CS degree learning Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Databases, Linear Algebra, Software Engineering, Information Analysis, Networking and many more.
How else would I have been able to center a div with CSS or change the background color?17:45 PM - 08 Jun 2020
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Here's a simple, no bullshit guide to centering content with CSS using Flexbox. Make sure to check the Flexbox CanIUse to make sure your target browsers have good support for it, otherwise this might not work.
Creating the skeleton
To start, let's write some HTML. parent-div is the element that will hold the child div that we want to center.
<html>
<head>
<title>Flexbox CSS Centering Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="parent-div">
<div id="child-div">
<h1>This is an example</h1>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
If you're wanting a good place to play around with this code in the browser, I recommend using CodePen. Here's the pen with the HTML used for this post. Just type in the CSS as we go along and you'll see everything updated in real time.
Our goal will be to get the child-div post centered within the parent div, both horizontally and vertically. We'll start by adding flexbox to the parent. Before we do this though, let's add some backgrounds to each of these elements so we can see where the browser is rendering them. Ugly, I know.
#parent-div {
background-color: red;
}
#child-div {
background-color: black;
}
Adding Flexbox to the parent
Making an item display using flex is simple: just use the display: flex; CSS property.
#parent-div {
background-color: red;
display: flex;
}
You shouldn't notice any changes in how the element is rendering yet. Let's add some height and width to parent element, making it the height and width of the browser viewport:
#parent-div {
background-color: red;
display: flex;
width: 100%;
height: 100vh;
}
Centering the content
Now that we have a parent element the width and height of the screen, let's center the child element horizontally and vertically inside the parent div. We'll use the justify-content and align-items CSS properties to make this happen:
#parent-div {
background-color: red;
display: flex;
width: 100%;
height: 100vh;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
}
And now we should see the child element centered inside the parent div!
Top comments (1)
Flexbox is so amazing. It's probably the best cross-platform layout tool that just works everywhere. I learned it by completing the flexbox zombies game. Check out my article on it, it's one of my favs that I have done. I like the animated divs in it.