Constant output from tailwind

[mzehrer]

When I run uv run plain dev, I get a constant output from tailwind:

How can I stop this?

[davegaeddert]

This happens to me too, although not quite that many per-second. Unfortunately I don't think Tailwind has any useful debugging modes to have it say what file change caused the build. I'm guessing that it is rebuilding on all kinds of irrelevant files changes (maybe even stuff vscode etc are doing in the background) but I haven't figured out a way to confirm it yet. Definitely want to solve it — if you figure anything out let me know!

[davegaeddert]

Maybe relevant: tailwindlabs/tailwindcss#15750

You can get a little more output with DEBUG='*' plain tailwind build --watch, but not much. It looks like it will "scan" for all kinds of things (like just running git status in the repo), but it's not always building...

Pretty annoying that it says "Done in x" all the time even if it isn't rebuilding. We could hide the output maybe, but we'd obviously still want to see any build error output somehow...

[davegaeddert]

I should add that I'm on a Mac, not sure about you.

[mzehrer]

I'm on Linux.

Here is my output:

❯ DEBUG='*' uv run plain tailwind build --watch
Tailwind already installed
Compiling tailwind.css to app/assets/tailwind.min.css...
≈ tailwindcss v4.1.12

[DEBUG] Writing debug info to: `/home/michael/Projekte/itop/osmailfilter-admin/tailwindcss-1017928.log`

Done in 484ms

[485.15ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (initial build)
[ 74.65ms]   ↳ Setup compiler
[260.15ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates
[113.69ms]   ↳ Build CSS
[  4.76ms]   ↳ Write output

Done in 14ms

[14.59ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (watcher)
[14.49ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates

Done in 13ms

[13.56ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (watcher)
[13.44ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates

Done in 18ms

[18.75ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (watcher)
[18.61ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates

Done in 17ms

[17.87ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (watcher)
[17.75ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates

Done in 20ms

[20.44ms] [@tailwindcss/cli] (watcher)
[20.28ms]   ↳ Scan for candidates

Done in 28ms

and continues on and on

[davegaeddert]

A related conversation: rails/tailwindcss-rails#491

Like them, I'm also inclined to wait and see if Tailwind does anything to fix this...

The only other thing that comes to mind right now is that we could use our own watcher instead of the built-in tailwind one. We do have watchfiles now as a dependency for a few other things, so it would be feasible to do. I don't love the idea of reimplementing what seems like a core Tailwind feature though. And I wouldn't be surprised if tailwind build is slower than the build that runs in tailwind build --watch, but I haven't tested that very thoroughly.