mode: Just in time VS Ahead of time

Tailwind CSS comes with two stylesheet generation modes to choose from:

1. Just in time (jit) - is the recommended mode. In this mode, Tailwind builds your stylesheet dynamically as you add/remove classes from your templates.

2. Ahead of time (aot) - is a legacy mode. In this mode, Tailwind builds the stylesheet with all classes available in the framework. As a result, you might end up with a huge stylesheet. To alleviate this, the production mode uses Purge CSS that removes unused styles from the stylesheet and dramatically reduces its size. But still, it’s not as good as the jit mode.

If you run the python manage.py tailwind init command, you’ll see a prompt to choose one of the modes. You can always change the selected mode later by editing your generated theme/static_src/tailwind.config.js file.