How to bundle tailwind css inside a Vue Component Package

Question

In one of my projects, I build a nice vue3 component that could be useful to several other projects. So I decided to publish it as an NPM package and share it with everyone.

I wrote the isolate component, build it and publish BUT I use Tailwind css to make the style. When I publish and install the component everything is working BUT without the beauty of the css part.

I tried several configurations and alternative tools to generate the package that automatically add the tailwind as an inner dependency to my package.

Does someone have experience with this? how can build/bundle my component by adding the tailwind CSS instructions into it?

Answer 1

You're almost there

Since you've got your component working, the majority of the part has been done.

For configuring the styling of the component you need to identify the Tailwind CSS classes being used by your Vue component package and retain them in the final CSS that is generated by the Tailwind engine in your project.

Follow below steps in the project where you want to use your tailwind vue component package.

For Tailwind CSS V3

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = [
    //...
    content: [
        "./index.html",
        "./src/**/*.{vue,js,ts,jsx,tsx}",
        "./node_modules/package-name/**/*.{vue,js,ts,jsx,tsx}"    // Add this line
        // Replace "package-name" with the name of the dependency package
    ],
    //...
]

For Tailwind CSS V2

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = [
    //...
    purge: {
        //...
        content: [
            "./index.html",
            "./src/**/*.{vue,js,ts,jsx,tsx}",
            "./node_modules/package-name/**/*.{vue,js,ts,jsx,tsx}"    // Add this line
            // Replace "package-name" with the name of the dependency package
        ],
        //...
    //...
    }
]

The content property in the tailwind.config.js file defines file path pattern that the tailwind engine should look into, for generating the final CSS file.

For Pro users

You may also try to automate the above setup by writing an install script for your npm package to add this configuration to the tailwind.config.js file

References

Tailwind Docs - 3rd party integration