How to use Tailwind CSS in Astro

— 5 minute read

To be honest, it's never been easier to include Tailwind CSS in a framework.

Why? Astro has build in support for Tailwind! 🥳 And yes, even the Tailwind JIT compiler.

I'll write down this quick guide to get you started setting up Tailwind CSS in an Astro project.

Installing Tailwind CSS in an Astro project

Let's start with a basic Astro project.

mkdir astro-tailwind && cd astro-tailwind
npm init astro

You can choose any of the templates. It doesn't matter, actually.

Now let's install Tailwind CSS.

npm install -D tailwindcss

The next step is to create a tailwind.config.js file to tell Tailwind which files to purge and enable the JIT compiler.

module.exports = {
  mode: 'jit',
  purge: ['./public/**/*.html', './src/**/*.{astro,js,jsx,ts,tsx,vue}'],
};

Then we can Astro that it should use this Tailwind config file by modifying the astro.config.js file and add this to the devOptions section.

devOptions: {
  tailwindConfig: './tailwind.config.js';
}

Now create a global.css file in the src/assets directory.

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

Let's modify our src/pages/index.astro to test out how it works.

The first thing we need to do is load our stylsheet in the head section:

Edit 25-10: This is Astro's new way of loading assets

<head>
  <!-- Other stuff -->
  <link rel="stylesheet" href={Astro.resolve("../assets/style/global.css")} >
</head>
<div class="bg-gradient-to-br from-indigo-900 to-green-900 min-h-screen overflow-auto">
  <div class="container max-w-5xl mx-auto px-4">
    <div class="w-4/5 mx-auto">
      <h1 class="mt-32 text-white text-6xl font-bold">
        <img width="60" height="80" src="/assets/logo.svg" alt="Astro logo" /> Welcome to
        <a href="https://astro.build/">Astro</a>
      </h1>
    </div>
    <div class="w-4/5 my-10 mx-auto">
      <h3 class="text-gray-300">
        Build faster websites with less
        <strong class="text-white">client-side Javascript</strong>
        <br />
        This is how easy it is to get started
      </h3>
    </div>
    <div class="w-2/5 mx-auto bg-black text-white p-10 leading-10 rounded-2xl shadow-lg">
      mkdir astro<br />
      cd astro<br />
      npm init astro
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

And this results in the following:

Tailwind starter in Astro

You can also download this project from GitHub.

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