Use Tailwind CSS#

Tailwind CSS is a CSS framework and design system based on utility class, which can quickly add common styles to components, and support flexible extension of theme styles.

You can integrate Tailwind CSS in Rsbuild via PostCSS plugins.

Installing Tailwind CSS#

Since Rsbuild has built-in support for postcss and autoprefixer, you only need to install tailwindcss and there is no need to install other npm packages:

npm add tailwindcss -D

Configuring PostCSS#

You can register the tailwindcss PostCSS plugin through postcss.config.cjs or tools.postcss.

module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    tailwindcss: {},
  },
};

Configuring Tailwind CSS#

Create a tailwind.config.js file in the root directory of your project and add the following content:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: ['./src/**/*.{html,js,ts,jsx,tsx}'],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
};

It should be noted that the content option should include the paths to all source files that contain Tailwind class names. For details, please refer to tailwindcss - Content Configuration.

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: [
    './src/**/*.{html,js,ts,jsx,tsx}',
    '../../lib1/src/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}',
  ],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
};

Other Configuration Methods#

• You can directly pass the Tailwind CSS configuration to postcss.config.cjs:

module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    tailwindcss: {
      content: ['./src/**/*.{html,js,ts,jsx,tsx}'],
      // ...other options
    },
  },
};

• You can also set the Tailwind CSS configuration through tools.postcss:

import tailwindcss from 'tailwindcss';

export default {
  tools: {
    postcss: {
      plugins: [
        tailwindcss({
          content: ['./src/**/*.{html,js,ts,jsx,tsx}'],
          // ...other options
        }),
      ],
    },
  },
};

But we recommend placing the Tailwind CSS configuration in tailwind.config.* because other methods may cause the Tailwind CSS build performance to degrade, refer to tailwindcss/issues/14229.

Importing CSS#

Add the @tailwind directives in your CSS entry file:

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

Depending on your needs, you can selectively import the CSS styles provided by Tailwind CSS. Please refer to the @tailwind documentation for detailed usage of the @tailwind directives.

Done#

You have now completed all the steps to integrate Tailwind CSS in Rsbuild!

You can use Tailwind's utility classes in any component or HTML, such as:

<h1 class="text-3xl font-bold underline">Hello world!</h1>

For more usage details, refer to the Tailwind CSS documentation.

VS Code Extension#

Tailwind CSS provides a Tailwind CSS IntelliSense plugin for VS Code to automatically complete Tailwind CSS class names, CSS functions, and directives.

You can install this plugin in VS Code to enable the autocompletion feature.

Build Performance#

When using Tailwind CSS, if the content field in tailwind.config.js is not correctly configured, this can lead to poor build performance and HMR performance. This is because Tailwind CSS internally matches files based on the glob defined in content. The more files it matches, the greater the performance overhead.

Therefore, we recommend that you specify the paths to be scanned accurately to avoid unnecessary performance overhead. For example, only include HTML or JS files in the project source code that actually contain Tailwind class names, and avoid including irrelevant files or directories, especially the node_modules directory.

Here is an bad example of scanning the node_modules:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: [
    './src/**/*.{html,js,ts,jsx,tsx}',
    // Scanning a large number of files, leading to performance degradation
    './node_modules/**/*.js',
  ],
};

Optimize CSS Size#

If you need to optimize the size of Tailwind CSS styles, you can try rsbuild-plugin-tailwindcss.

This plugin reads the module graph information of Rspack, automatically sets the accurate content configuration to generate minimal Tailwind CSS styles.

import { pluginTailwindCSS } from 'rsbuild-plugin-tailwindcss';

export default {
  plugins: [pluginTailwindCSS()],
};

See rsbuild-plugin-tailwindcss for more information.