How to configure tailwind v4 in Go project, as standalone build step.

[theKlisha]

Hi! I'm maintaining golang project and I use tailwind in html templates. With version v3.4.17 I could run tailwindcss -o $(STYLESHEET_MIN) --minify in my Makefile, provided I had tailwind.config.js file with the following content:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: ["./**/*.templ", "./**/*.html"],
  includeLanguages: { templ: "html" },
};

But this approach does not seem to work in version 4. I'm forced to provide input file with -i flag. I could live with it but only one file at the time can be provided this way, forcing me to use some other CSS preprocessing tool together with tailwind. Is there a way for me to upgrade without complicating build process by including additional tooling/dependencies?

[wongjn]

Indeed, an input CSS file is required by the CLI.

[theKlisha]

Ok, so as I understand it right now, since v4 there is no way for tailwind to aggregate input files, to produce one single css output file, without additional tools, external to tailwind itself. Do I understand it correctly?

[wongjn]

You can @import all CSS files from one main CSS file, and use that main CSS file as the input file in the tailwindcss command.

[section14]

You can still use the config file by adding this (with the correct path to tailwind.config.js) to your css file.

@config "../tailwind.config.js";

Not sure if this will solve your particular problem. But, I'm working on a project using templ files, and it did the trick building with Vite. On a personal note, deprecating the config file has me looking elsewhere. I'm sure the auto-detection feature is great for strictly JS frontend projects, but for templated projects that have a lot non-frontend code, I don't like the idea that I need to expose my entire project to tailwind when I only need it to look in a single directory.

[theKlisha]

Thanks, though I could not make it work. I agree with you on deprecating config file. I'll just stick with tailwind V3 as long as possible, and switch to something else when forced to.

[pavelanni]

@theKlisha In case you haven't found a solution yet, here is what I got with help from Gemini. It explained that in v4, the main config file is now input.css, and you should place the path to find your templates there instead of the old tailwind.config.js. Here is my input.css:

@import "tailwindcss";

@source "./templates/**/*.go.html";

After that, it generated a reasonable tailwind.css and now my site is working. Hope this helps.