Include tailwindcss in a Django project

Why django-tailwind?

Tailwindcss has become my goto Framework for Frontend development and there are very good reasons why. But as always, there is no straightforward way to include javascript libraries into a Django project. 1 After some research, I found that django-tailwind is a very good and straightforward start to set up Tailwindcss inside a Django project. And it comes additionally with instructions on how to set up browser reload, so your styles get automatically updated during development, which gives it a very close feel like developing on a frontend framework like Svelte.

Installation

The instructions on how to set up django-tailwind are pretty straightforward. I would like to add that with poetry, in order to install the browser reload only for dev requirements, you need to do this:

poetry add django-tailwind  # installs it to the prod requirements
poetry add -G dev django-tailwind --extras reload  # installs browser reload only for dev requirements

After following the installation instructions, everything works out of the box. I added following settings to my project structure, so statics and templates are found during development:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...
        "DIRS": [BASE_DIR / "templates", BASE_DIR / "theme" / "templates"],
        ...
    },
]
STATICFILES_DIRS = [BASE_DIR / "static", BASE_DIR / "theme" / "static"]

Thoughts

I like the separation of the templates and frontend into a separate app called “theme”. Nothing that django-tailwind does is magic and you could create the same project structure and build scripts manually. But it’s a nice automation for normally very tedious setup of the package.json file.

Extra

Every time you run your development server, you need to make sure to run both python manage.py tailwind start and python manage.py runserver. There is a nice npm package called PM2, that can manage multiple processes and run them in parallel. You can integrate it in your Makefile or for your Docker entrypoint. Here is an example for the Makefile:

runserver:
    npm i -g pm2
    pm2-runtime ecosystem.config.js

Your “ecosystem.config.js” file can look like this:

module.exports = {
  apps: [
    {
      name: "npm-dev",
      cwd: "./src/theme/static_src/",
      script: "npm",
      args: "run start",  // this is essentially the same as "python manage.py tailwind start"
      watch: true
    },
    {
      name: "django-runserver",
      cwd: "./src/",
      script: "python",
      args: "manage.py runserver",
      watch: true
    },
  ],
};

  1. Here is another nice blog on how to handle Django and Javascript together: Modern JavaScript for Django Developers ↩

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