TailwindCSS

What is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a tiny, utility first CSS framework for building custom designs, without the context switching that regular CSS requires. It is purely a CSS framework and does not provide any pre-built components or logic, and provides a very different set of benefits compared to a component library like Material UI.

It makes CSS incredibly easy and quick to write, as shown by the following example:

Old CSS:

1. Write CSS, often in a separate file

.my-class {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
  background-color: #fff;
  border: 1px solid #e2e8f0;
  border-radius: 0.25rem;
  padding: 1rem;
}

2. Import CSS into your component

import "./my-class.css";

3. Add the class to your HTML

<div class="my-class">...</div>

Equivalent in Tailwind:

1. Just write classes in your HTML

<div
  class="flex flex-col items-center justify-center rounded border border-gray-200 bg-white p-4"
>
  ...
</div>

When used together with React Components, it is extremely powerful for quickly building UIs.

Tailwind CSS has a beautiful built-in design system, that comes out of the box with a carefully chosen color palette, sizing patterns for styles such as width/height and padding/margin for a uniform design, as well as media breakpoints for creating responsive layouts. This design system can be customized and extended to create the exact toolbox of styles that your project needs.

Usage

Make sure you have editor plugins for Tailwind installed to improve your experience writing Tailwind.

Extensions and Plugins

• VSCode Extension

Formatting

Tailwind CSS classes can easily get a bit messy, so a formatter for the classes is a must have. Tailwind CSS Prettier Plugin sorts the classes in the recommended order so that the classes match the outputted css bundle. This is already included in the Prettier setup for this application.

Conditionally Applying Classes

Conditionally adding classes using ternaries can get very messy and hard to read. When using @opengovsg/oui, the tailwind-variants package is already included to help with this (exported as tv).

• tailwind-variants Documentation

OUI Design System

This application uses OGP's OUI Design System, and as such the relevant documentation can be found in the documentation site.

Customising the theme

The theme can be customised by generating a TailwindCSS file. You can read more about how to do this in OUI's Theming Documentation.

note

If your product has a custom theme (inquire with your designer!), it is highly likely that it can be generated using the @opengovsg/oui-token-gen package. Documentation for this package can be found here.

Useful Resources

Resource	Link
Tailwind Docs	https://tailwindcss.com/docs/editor-setup/
Tailwind Cheat Sheet	https://nerdcave.com/tailwind-cheat-sheet/
awesome-tailwindcss	https://github.com/aniftyco/awesome-tailwindcss/
Tailwind Community	https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/
Tailwind Discord Server	https://tailwindcss.com/discord/
TailwindLabs Youtube Channel	https://www.youtube.com/tailwindlabs/
Tailwind Playground	https://play.tailwindcss.com/