prettier-plugin-tailwindcss

What is prettier-plugin-tailwindcss?

The prettier-plugin-tailwindcss npm package is a plugin for Prettier, the code formatter, that sorts Tailwind CSS classes automatically. It ensures that your Tailwind CSS classes are ordered consistently according to the recommended order from the Tailwind CSS documentation. This can help improve readability and maintainability of your code.

What are prettier-plugin-tailwindcss's main functionalities?

Sorting Tailwind CSS classes

This plugin will reorder the classes to follow the default Tailwind CSS order, for example, positioning classes like 'flex' and 'justify-center' would come before display and box model classes like 'p-4' and 'bg-red-500'.

"<div class='bg-red-500 p-4 flex justify-center'>Hello World</div>"

Other packages similar to prettier-plugin-tailwindcss

headwind

Headwind is a Visual Studio Code extension that also sorts Tailwind CSS classes automatically. It is similar to prettier-plugin-tailwindcss but is specifically designed for VS Code and does not require Prettier.

tailwindcss-classnames

This package is a typed utility function to combine Tailwind CSS classes. While it does not sort classes, it provides a way to conditionally join class names together, which can be useful in conjunction with a sorting tool.

tailwind-merge

tailwind-merge is a utility to merge Tailwind CSS classes without duplicates and with optimized class precedence. It does not sort classes but ensures that the final class string is optimized for Tailwind CSS.

README

A Prettier plugin for Tailwind CSS v3.0+ that automatically sorts classes based on our recommended class order.

Installation

To get started, just install prettier-plugin-tailwindcss as a dev-dependency:

npm install -D prettier prettier-plugin-tailwindcss

This plugin follows Prettier’s autoloading convention, so as long as you’ve got Prettier set up in your project, it’ll start working automatically as soon as it’s installed.

Resolving your Tailwind configuration

To ensure that the class sorting is taking into consideration any of your project's Tailwind customizations, it needs access to your Tailwind configuration file (tailwind.config.js).

By default the plugin will look for this file in the same directory as your Prettier configuration file. However, if your Tailwind configuration is somewhere else, you can specify this using the tailwindConfig option in your Prettier configuration.

Note that paths are resolved relative to the Prettier configuration file.

// prettier.config.js
module.exports = {
  tailwindConfig: './styles/tailwind.config.js',
}

If a local configuration file cannot be found the plugin will fallback to the default Tailwind configuration.

Compatibility with other Prettier plugins

To make this plugin work we had to use private Prettier APIs that can only be used by a single plugin at once. This means this plugin is incompatible with other Prettier plugins that are using the same APIs.

The most popular example we know of is prettier-plugin-svelte, which can't be installed at the same time as the Tailwind CSS plugin.

To work around this, we've bundled prettier-plugin-svelte directly into prettier-plugin-tailwindcss, so if you'd like to use this plugin with Svelte, just uninstall prettier-plugin-svelte and everything should work as expected.

If you discover any other incompatibilities, open an issue and hopefully we can figure out a way to make it work.