Reactmarkdown and Tailwindcss for Dynamic Web Design

Reactmarkdown is a powerful tool that allows you to create dynamic web designs by converting markdown text into React components. It's perfect for building documentation, blogs, and other content-driven websites.

With Reactmarkdown, you can write markdown text and have it rendered as React components, making it easy to create dynamic and interactive web pages. This feature is particularly useful for building documentation websites where you need to display code snippets, tables, and other formatted content.

Tailwindcss is a utility-first CSS framework that provides a set of pre-designed classes for styling your web pages. By using Tailwindcss, you can create responsive and customizable designs with minimal code.

To configure Tailwind in an Nx workspace, you need to install the necessary npm packages and create the tailwind.config.js as well as postcss.config.js files. Tailwind comes with a utility for generating these files, so you can use that to simplify the process.

The tailwind.config.js file is where you'll define your Tailwind configuration, including any custom settings or presets. Make sure to adjust the postcss.config.js file to point to your tailwind config file.

You can also use Tailwind presets to define global, cross-app configs. To do this, create a tailwind-workspace-preset.js file at the Nx workspace root and add it to your tailwind config. This allows you to share Tailwind configurations across multiple apps in your workspace.

Here's a quick rundown of the Tailwind config files you'll need to create:

To install and configure Tailwind in an Nx workspace, start by installing the necessary npm packages. This is the first step in the process.

Create the tailwind.config.js as well as postcss.config.js files. Tailwind comes with a utility that can help with this, but you'll need to cd into the apps folder of Nx where your app was generated.

Make sure to adjust your postcss.config.js to properly point to your tailwind config file. This is an important step to ensure everything works smoothly.

In your _app.tsx file, remove the header section as you won't need it right now. This will help keep your code organized and focused on the task at hand.

Here are the steps to install and configure Tailwind in an Nx workspace:

To enable purging, open the tailwind.config.js file for your site app and add the globs to the purge property. This is a crucial step to reduce the final CSS bundle to only the required parts.

The globs can be customized by specifying the 2nd parameter of the createGlobPatternsForDependencies function. This allows you to dynamically calculate the glob pattern based on which libs your Next.js app depends on.

In a large workspace, naively adding globs to all files in the libs/** folder can lead to unnecessary parsing of files. This is because not all libs might be used by your Next app.

Nx has a dependency graph that can be used to visualize and leverage in your custom scripts. This makes it easy to generate glob patterns based on the apps' dependencies.

To verify the purging works as intended, execute the build or export target on your app (nx run site:build). The resulting CSS file should be only a couple of KBs.

In this example, we can see how to put everything together. You can install TailwindCSS into an Nx workspace by following the steps outlined in the article.

To recap, we've learned how to configure PostCSS and Tailwind, organize Tailwind config files in a monorepo, and set up CSS purging with Tailwind. Nx helps to generate globs for dependent projects, making it easier to manage your CSS.

Here's a quick rundown of the key takeaways:

Let's take a look at a concrete example of how Parsedown and Tailwind can be used together. Parsedown processes markdown snippets into HTML, but without any classes, the result looks pretty unformatted.

The lack of classes is due to Tailwind normalizing the styling of the browser with a small set of presets. This can be seen in the example where the markdown snippet processed through Parsedown results in no classes applied to the HTML.

To rewrite the layout of the h1 tag, a plugin can be used. First, we need to make sure that the normal generation keeps working.

We've covered a lot of ground in this article, from installing TailwindCSS into an Nx workspace to setting up CSS purging.

You can now successfully integrate TailwindCSS into your Nx project.

TailwindCSS can be configured with PostCSS, and we've walked through the process of doing so.

Here are the key takeaways from this article:

The sources for this article can be found in the GitHub repository.

Using ReactMarkdown with TailwindCSS can be a great combination, but like any solution, it has its pros and cons.

One of the pros is that base styles will apply globally on every page, which can be a positive aspect depending on your situation.

The solution is easily maintainable and only requires adjustments in one file, making it a breeze to update.

However, the amount of customization is small, and it relies on Tailwind features to customize the result.

On the other hand, the plugin for this case can be seen as overengineering, which might not be ideal for everyone.