How to Combine Tailwind CSS with Styled Components

In recent years, both Tailwind CSS and Styled Components have gained significant popularity among web developers. Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that provides a set of pre-defined classes to quickly build user interfaces, while Styled Components is a library that allows developers to write CSS in JavaScript, creating reusable and component-based styles. Both tools offer unique advantages, but have you ever wondered if it's possible to combine them?

In this blog post, we will explore how you can leverage the power of Tailwind CSS and Styled Components together to create a highly customizable and efficient styling workflow for your web projects.

Why Combine Tailwind CSS with Styled Components?

Before diving into the implementation details, let's take a moment to understand why combining Tailwind CSS with Styled Components can be beneficial for your development workflow.

Leverage the best of both worlds: Tailwind CSS offers a comprehensive set of utility classes that enable rapid prototyping and development. On the other hand, Styled Components provide a more flexible and component-based approach to styling. By combining them, you can benefit from the speed and efficiency of Tailwind CSS while enjoying the flexibility and reusability of Styled Components.
Customization and theming: Tailwind CSS allows you to customize every aspect of your design by modifying the configuration file. Styled Components, on the other hand, provides dynamic theming capabilities. By combining the two, you can create a powerful theming system that allows you to easily switch between different visual styles while maintaining the efficiency of Tailwind CSS.
Component-based styling: Styled Components enable you to write CSS directly within your JavaScript code, making it easier to manage styles on a per-component basis. By combining Tailwind CSS with Styled Components, you can define reusable styles for your components using Tailwind utility classes, and then enhance them with custom styles using Styled Components.

Now that we understand the advantages of combining Tailwind CSS with Styled Components, let's dive into the implementation details.

Setting Up the Project

To get started, create a new React project using your preferred tooling. For this example, we'll use Create React App.

Install Create React App globally by running the following command:

npm install -g create-react-app

Create a new React project by running the following command:

npx create-react-app tailwind-styled-components

Change into the project directory:

cd tailwind-styled-components

Install the required dependencies:

npm install tailwindcss styled-components

Configuring Tailwind CSS

Next, we need to configure Tailwind CSS to work with Styled Components. Follow these steps to set up Tailwind CSS in your project:

Create a new file named tailwind.config.js in the root of your project directory.
Open the tailwind.config.js file and add the following code:

module.exports = {
  purge: [],
  darkMode: false,
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

In the same directory, create a new file named src/tailwind.css.
Open the src/tailwind.css file and add the following code:

@import 'tailwindcss/base';
@import 'tailwindcss/components';
@import 'tailwindcss/utilities';

Integrating Styled Components

Now that we have Tailwind CSS set up, let's integrate Styled Components into our project.

Create a new file named src/StyledButton.js.
Open the src/StyledButton.js file and add the following code:

import styled from 'styled-components';

const StyledButton = styled.button`
  /* Add your custom styles here */
`;

export default StyledButton;

Combining Tailwind CSS and Styled Components

With Tailwind CSS and Styled Components set up, we can now combine them to create powerful and customizable styles for our components.

Open the src/StyledButton.js file and modify the code as follows:

import styled from 'styled-components';

const StyledButton = styled.button`
  /* Add Tailwind utility classes here */
  @apply bg-blue-500 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded;
`;

export default StyledButton;

Open the src/App.js file and modify the code as follows:

import React from 'react';
import StyledButton from './StyledButton';

function App() {
  return (
    <div className="flex justify-center items-center h-screen">
      <StyledButton>Click me!</StyledButton>
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Customizing and Theming

One of the major advantages of combining Tailwind CSS with Styled Components is the ability to customize and theme your application easily.

Open the tailwind.config.js file and modify the code as follows:

module.exports = {
  purge: [],
  darkMode: false,
  theme: {
    extend: {
      colors: {
        primary: '#FF0000',
      },
    },
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

Open the src/StyledButton.js file and modify the code as follows:

import styled from 'styled-components';

const StyledButton = styled.button`
  /* Add Tailwind utility classes here */
  @apply bg-primary text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded;
`;

export default StyledButton;

Now, the button will have a red background color defined by the primary color we added to the Tailwind CSS configuration.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how to combine Tailwind CSS with Styled Components to create a highly customizable and efficient styling workflow for your web projects. We discussed the advantages of this combination, set up a project using Create React App, configured Tailwind CSS, integrated Styled Components, and combined the two to create powerful and customizable styles.

By leveraging the best of both Tailwind CSS and Styled Components, you can create visually stunning and highly maintainable web applications. So go ahead, give it a try, and take your styling workflow to the next level!

How to Combine Tailwind CSS with Styled Components