Usage

Running in development mode

To start Django Tailwind in development mode, run the following command in a terminal:

python manage.py tailwind start

This will start a long-running process that watches files for changes. Use a combination of CTRL + C to terminate the process.

Several things are happening behind the scenes at that moment:

  1. When Tailwind CSS jit mode is enabled, a stylesheet is updated every time you add or remove a CSS class in a Django template.

  2. The browser-sync service watches for changes in HTML and CSS files. When a Django template page is updated, a browser reloads it. When a CSS file is updated, browser-sync applies updates without reloading the page. That gives you a smooth development experience without the need to reload the page to see updates.

  3. The nodemon watches for config file changes (tailwind.config.js, postcss.config.js, bs.config.js) and restarts the long-polling process every time there’s a change in those files.

If by somewhat reason you don’t want to use hot-reloading, you can run the long-polling process with the --no-sync option to disable hot reloading:

python manage.py tailwind start --no-sync

Building for production

To create a production build of your theme, run:

python manage.py tailwind build

This will replace the development build with a bundle optimized for production. No further actions are necessary; you can deploy!