Scope-Tailwind

This project is designed for cases where you want to drop Tailwind into a part of your project without messing up the other styles.

We prevent your Tailwind styles from leaking out. Our generated CSS files only apply inside your desired elements, and you can even use preflight without causing any global style leaks.

We prevent your global styles from leaking in. We auto-prefix classNames inside of your desired elements so global classNames won't leak in. You don't have to write "prefix-" in front of every class, this is automatic!

Using Scope-Tailwind

To use Scope-Tailwind, run scope-tailwind in the terminal. Here are all the options:

scope-tailwind ./src    # the source folder with your jsx/tsx files (required)
-p "prefix-"            # prefix to use
-s "scope"              # we only apply TW styles inside elements with this class as an ancestor
-g "@@"                 # we never prefix elements that start with this
-o ./src2               # the output directory that will be created

Your styles will not appear unless you add an element with class "scope", or disable scoping with -s "".

The prefix you specify must agree with the prefix in tailwind.config.js.

Example

Run scope-tailwind and we'll convert your TSX/JSX files which look like this:

function MyComponent() {
    return <div className='my-5 mt-2 bg-red-500 @@dont-prefix-this'>
       Hello
    </div>
}

Into files that look like this:

function MyComponent() {
    return <div className='prefix-my-5 prefix-mt-2 prefix-bg-red-500 dont-prefix-this'>
        Hello
    </div>
}

And we'll convert your CSS files that look like this:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Into files that look like this:

.scope *, .scope ::before, .scope ::after {
  --tw-border-spacing-x: 0;
  /* ... other generated TW styles, now scoped to "scope" className ... */
}

Caveats

If you have complex className logic with a lot of variables, scope-tailwind is not a good fit right now, because we only add prefixes to strings inside className=..., not outside. For example, this works with scope-tailwind:

<div className={isHidden ? 'hidden' : `my-2 px-3 ${isFlex ? 'flex flex-col gap-2' : 'block'}`}>

But the following WILL NOT work:

const myStyles = 'my-5 py-5 mt-2 bg-red-500'
<div className={myStyles}>

We can fix this by adding a dummy symbol so you can tell scope-tailwind to prefixify strings outside className, but we haven't gotten to this yet.

Details

Here's what goes on behind the scenes.

1. First, we prefixify:

src                                                src2
className="h-3 my-2 @@myclass"       -->           className="prefix-h-3 prefix-my-2 myclass"

2. Then, we scopify:

src2/styles.css                   src2/styles.css                     src2/styles.css
@tailwind base      -->           .h-3 { }              -->           .prefix-h-3 { }

Building

If you make any changes to this repo as a contributor, just run npm run build to re-compile the build. To test your changes, the easiest thing to do is run npm link, which installs the project globally as if you installed it from npm. Run npm run refreshlink to refresh.

If you want to understand how the tool works, just open up the generated src2/ folder and look at the css file and the classNames. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out at support@voideditor.com.