Tailwind expanding slider

— 5 minute read

Some time ago, I made this cool expanding slider in CSS. And I was intrigued if it was possible in Tailwind.

The short answer: Yes!

This is what it will look like:

See the Pen Tailwind expanding slider by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Tailwind expanding slider structure

We obviously have some help by already having made this before. For the Tailwind version, let's start by making the container and slider wrapper.

<div class="flex w-full h-full items-center justify-center">
  <div class="flex w-5/6 h-5/6">
    <!-- Slides here -->
  </div>
</div>

Yes, that is basically it! So far, we didn't need anything fancy, but let's move onto how a slide should look.

<div
  class="slide relative flex-auto bg-cover bg-center transition-all duration-500 ease-in-out hover:flex-grow"
  style="background-image:url('img.png')"
></div>

There are two things to note here:

  1. For the codepen, I used an inline background-image
  2. I use the slide class for the hover

These two elements should be included in the tailwind.config.js file and extend Tailwind.

This config will look like this:

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {
      backgroundImage: {
        1: "url('1.jpg')",
        2: "url('2.jpg')",
        3: "url('3.jpg')",
        4: "url('4.jpg')",
        5: "url('5.jpg')"
      },
      flex: {
        5: 5
      }
    }
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: []
};

Note: Check out this article for custom config in Tailwind

With the config in place we can convert our HTML to look like this:

<div class="flex w-full h-full items-center justify-center">
  <div class="flex w-5/6 h-5/6">
    <div class="slide bg-1"></div>
    <div class="slide bg-2"></div>
    <div class="slide bg-3"></div>
    <div class="slide bg-4"></div>
    <div class="slide bg-5"></div>
  </div>
</div>

Way cleaner, right?

Now all we need to do is add the custom CSS.

.slide {
  @apply relative flex-auto bg-cover bg-center transition-all duration-500 ease-in-out;
}
.slide:hover {
  @apply flex-5;
}

And that's it! You can find this demo on the Tailwind playground.

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