The easy way to add Tailwind CSS to Gatsby

I’ve had a bear of a time trying to add Tailwind CSS to my Gatsby site. Most of the blog posts I found for implementing the library were either outdated, referenced installing a lot of unnecessary npm modules, or contained a lot of opinionated boilerplate code. Instead, I decided to implement Tailwind in the simplest way possible.

If you are starting a new blog on Gatsby and would like Tailwind CSS included with it by default, check out the gatsby-starter-blog-tailwindcss starter. The config is clean, and I actually grabbed most of the implementation info from this repo.

Create the config files

First create the following two configuration files needed for both Tailwind CSS and PostCSS, and modify as necessary:

const defaultTheme = require("tailwindcss/defaultTheme")

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {
      fontFamily: {
        serif: ["Merriweather", ...defaultTheme.fontFamily.serif],
        sans: ["Montserrat", ...defaultTheme.fontFamily.sans],
      },
    },
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

module.exports = () => ({
  plugins: [require("tailwindcss")],
})

Add npm dependencies

Next, install the Tailwind CSS and Gatsby PostCSS Plugins npm packages:

npm install gatsby-plugin-postcss tailwindcss

Add PostCSS plugin to Gatsby Config

In order to get PostCSS to trigger properly in the Gatsby build process, add the following line to the Gatsby config file:

    // ...
    `gatsby-plugin-postcss`,
   ],
 }

Import Tailwind CSS

And finally, import the Tailwind CSS in the Gatsby Browser JS:

// ...
import "tailwindcss/base.css"
import "tailwindcss/components.css"
import "tailwindcss/utilities.css"
// ...

Conclusion

That should be a wrap! Now you can add Tailwind classes to your HTML elements like so:

<div className="text-center">