Make The Build Credit More Flexible - Injecting in to a final css can break downstream processors

[dsiebes]

I recently ran in to an issue where using Tailwind4's vite plugin my downstream ci/cd processes were failing. It turns out they were not able to process the built css file Tailwind4/Vite generated due to the licensing credit:

tailwindcss/packages/tailwindcss/src/index.ts

Line 699 in aa817fb

if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test') {

This line
if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test') {
ast.unshift(comment(! tailwindcss v${version} | MIT License | https://tailwindcss.com ))
}

adds
/*! tailwindcss v4.1.7 | MIT License | https://tailwindcss.com */

above final style.css compiled files.

This is great! Its important to give Tailwind credit and follow licensing requirements, but for some applications this can have consequences. WordPress, for example, which has an ecosystem of plugins that expect the top of a compiled style.css in a theme to always follow the same format.

For example:

/*! tailwindcss v4.1.7 | MIT License | https://tailwindcss.com */
/*!
Theme Name: A WordPress Theme
Theme URI: https://github.com/my-wp-theme
Description: A modern Tailwind theme for WordPress
Version: 0.0.1
Tested up to: 6.7
Requires PHP: 8.1

This theme...
*/

This results in downstream processors that can not parse the version of the theme, breaking features like autoupdating.

Would it make sense to add a flag or option to move the Tailwind license credit to the bottom of a file or give those controlling CI/CD pipelines some agency over how the credit is made so that we can still credit Tailwind when NODE_ENV is set to production?