Could TAILWIND_CLI_PATH point to a binary?

[jefftriplett]

Wonderful tool btw.

This is a one-part question and one-part help for anyone else who might be trying to wrap their head around making this work in Docker so that it doesn't try to re-download the tailwindcss binary every time python manage.py tailwind <cmd> is run.

I'm using django-tailwind-cli in containers, and I found myself struggling/jumping through a few hoops to get the tailwindcss binary to work effectively.

I mistakenly had TAILWIND_CLI_PATH set to /usr/bin/tailwindcss which created /usr/bin/tailwindcss/tailwindcss-linux-x64-3.3.5.

What I'm using now is:

ARG TAILWINDCSS_VERSION=3.3.5
...

# download the Tailwind CSS CLI binary
ADD https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/releases/download/v${TAILWINDCSS_VERSION}/tailwindcss-linux-x64 \
    /usr/bin/tailwindcss-linux-x64-${TAILWINDCSS_VERSION}

RUN chmod 755 /usr/bin/tailwindcss-linux-x64-${TAILWINDCSS_VERSION}

...

RUN DATABASE_URL=sqlite://:memory: python manage.py tailwind --skip-checks build

Would it make sense to allow users to set where the Tailwind CSS CLI binary is stored?

[oliverandrich]

The reasoning of using TAILWIND_CLI_PATH as the base path where to store the actual binary is, that if you are working with a team of developers using a mixed setup of operating systems and system architectues, as we do, we can share a common configuration for the project, and everyone gets the correct version of the CLI installed.

But I can see the issue you are facing right now. We are not using dev containers at all, so we haven't encountered it yet.

Two quick ideas:

• If TAILWIND_CLI_PATH is pointing at a directory, we stick to the current behaviour.
• If TAILWIND_CLI_PATH is referencing an existing file, the file is checked and used as the CLI of choice.

This would allow you to mount a common CLI version into your dev containers, or base them on a common base image which already includes the CLI version.

What do you think?

[jefftriplett]

I think TAILWIND_CLI_PATH being able to point to a binary would be useful.

That said, the more I thought about it, the more I realized there wasn't a huge reason to manually download the binary like I was doing when django-tailwind-cli could do in my Dockerfile.

For anyone reading up on this. This is good enough:

...

# add this towards the bottom
RUN DATABASE_URL=sqlite://:memory: python manage.py tailwind --skip-checks build

...

I think because I was already downloading the tailwind binary, I was approaching the problem differently.

[[Fwiw, I'm not using dev containers (boo), but I'm using docker compose (yay) and the development flow is really nice for all platforms.]]

Thanks again!

[oliverandrich]

Great. And I will add the extra functionality for the TAILWIND_CLI_PATH.