To fly you need a tailwind

Why TailwindCSS

In one of my previous projects, I fell in love with TailwindCSS. I know that this is a very controversial framework for some, but for me, personally, as a backend developer of 11 years, it was the first time I had a fun time adding styles to the frontend. I even created vue-ts template with it, as a part of another articles’ series.

Asset management in Hugo

There are few ways to add CSS library to our blog, because Hugo supports multiple ways to do asset management. If you used TailwindCSS before you may know that to better integrate with other build tools, like webpack, Vite etc., it supports PostCSS out of the box. Luckily for us, Hugo supports it as well. We are going to install TailwindCSS as a PostCSS plugin and then use Hugo’s PostCSS pipe to integrate it to our blog. With this plan in mind, let’s get started.

Install TailwindCSS

We start with following official docs in a blog/ folder.

  1. Install TailwindCSS and PostCSS
    $ npm install --save-dev tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer
  2. Add .gitignore file for Node.js projects
  3. Create configuration files.
    $ npx tailwindcss init --postcss
    added --postcss option to initialize a postcss.config.js file as well.
  4. Configure your template paths. Our only content files located in blog/src/layouts folder.
    diff --git a/blog/tailwind.config.js b/blog/tailwind.config.js
index 32e3abd..7b5a700 100644
--- a/blog/tailwind.config.js
+++ b/blog/tailwind.config.js
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 /** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
 module.exports = {
-  content: [],
+  content: ["./src/layouts/**/*.html"],
   theme: {
     extend: {},
   },
  5. Add the Tailwind directives to your CSS
    $ mkdir -p blog/src/assets
$ touch !$/main.css
    and then update newly created blog/src/assets/main.css
    diff --git a/blog/src/assets/css/main.css b/blog/src/assets/css/main.css
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5c61c9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/blog/src/assets/css/main.css
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+@tailwind base;
+@tailwind components;
+@tailwind utilities;
    also, we are going to update .editorconfig, .pre-commit-config.yaml and .prettierrc.yaml to enable support for css file type.

Configure Hugo to use PostCSS

Now we have installed TailwindCSS, we are ready to start configuring our blog to use it via PostCSS pipe.

From the docs

Hugo Pipe’s PostCSS requires the postcss-cli JavaScript package to be installed in the environment (npm install -g postcss postcss-cli) along with any PostCSS plugin(s) used (e.g., npm install -g autoprefixer).

  1. Install postcss-cli

    $ npm install --save-dev postcss-cli

  2. Add link tag with our processed CSS to blog/src/layouts/partials/head.html

    diff --git a/blog/src/layouts/partials/head.html b/blog/src/layouts/partials/head.html
index b9f74a6..556a0cf 100644
--- a/blog/src/layouts/partials/head.html
+++ b/blog/src/layouts/partials/head.html
@@ -3,4 +3,6 @@
     <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />
     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
     <title>{{ .Site.Title }}</title>
+    {{ $css := resources.Get "css/main.css" | resources.PostCSS }}
+    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $css.RelPermalink }}" />

  3. Add scripts command to package.json to run hugo in NPM environment. By default, Hugo will search for node_modules/

    From Hugo 0.78.1 the start directory for resolving NPM packages (aka. packages that live inside a node_modules folder) is always the main project folder.

    but because of our project structure we need to run hugo as npm command. We will use start as command name because npm has shorthand for it.

    diff --git a/blog/package.json b/blog/package.json
index 3f40e6d..5b5d864 100644
--- a/blog/package.json
+++ b/blog/package.json
@@ -1,4 +1,7 @@
 {
+    "scripts": {
+        "start": "hugo --source src server --baseURL http://localhost/"
+    },
     "devDependencies": {
         "autoprefixer": "^10.4.7",
         "postcss": "^8.4.14",

  4. Profit!

We now have a blog that uses TailwindCSS.

Asset management in Hugo

Install TailwindCSS

Configure Hugo to use PostCSS