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Integrating TailwindCSS into Flask Apps

June 2, 2021

TailwindCSS is a utility-first CSS framework used to build frontend applications. TailwindCSS differs from other kinds of CSS frameworks as it gives the user total control over their design.

Rather than adding obscure CSS classes to your code, with TailwindCSS you use utility classes to create your components, with as much control over every single styling as you want. All without having to ever write a single line of CSS.

Prerequisites

For demonstration purposes in this article, I’ll be using Python3, Flask, and JavaScript package managers (npm or yarn).

I am assuming the reader has basic understanding of Python and by extension - Flask, and is already quite conversant with TailwindCSS.

Having the following will be needed:

  • Python3
  • Node.js 12.13.0 or higher
  • npm or yarn
  • Flask
  • Your Favorite text editor
  • Knowledge of using TailwindCSS

Building a simple Flask app

Installing Flask

We’ll begin by creating a really simple Flask server, that is capable of rendering frontend templates on our behalf.

To begin we open up the terminal and install Flask using Python’s package manager, as follows:

pip install flask

This will install Flask neatly for us on our computer, if you already have it installed you can skip this step. You can also choose to install it in a virtual environment if you feel like it.

Creating the Flask server

The next step is to create a simple flask server that will render the frontend templates for us. Create a new folder (anywhere you wish) to hold our files and create a new file called app.py in the folder.

Create a sub-folder called templates as well; this is where all HTML files will go. Next we’ll create another subfolder called static. This folder will hold all static files, including CSS files, scripts, and images for our frontend templates.

When you’re done the folder should look like this:

projectfolder/
   - app.py
   - templates/
   - static/

Now in app.py we’ll add the following lines of code to create a server.

from flask import Flask, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route("/")
@app.route("/index")
def index():
	return render_template("index.html")


if __name__ == '__main__':
	app.run(debug=True)

The code block above creates a simple server with one endpoint (or route) that renders (or displays) a web page, that is supposed to be from a file called index.html as seen in the code. However, we haven’t created that file yet.

Remember, I mentioned that all HTML files go in the templates folder we created earlier. We’ll go to that folder and add a new file called index.html so our Flask server can see it.

In index.html we can add a simple “hello world” h1 tag as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title></title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <h1>Hello World</h1>
  </body>
</html>

We’ll save that and test run our server, from the terminal using the following command.

python app.py

Once the server is running head over to:

http://localhost:5000/index to test the server and you should see the “hello world” from the index.html file.

demo1

Installing TailwindCSS

To install Tailwind we can use either yarn or npm (depending on which one you have on your system). We navigate to the static folder we created earlier from the terminal using the cd command.

Once there we’ll use the init command to setup a new Node.js environment, that will allow us to install TailwindCSS using npm or yarn as follows:

npm init

Or with yarn:

yarn init

Doing this creates a new file called package.json which keeps track of installed (JavaScript) dependencies in our project. We can think of it as the requirements.txt file that holds dependencies in Python projects.

The next thing is to run the installation command to actually install TailwindCSS, this is done as follows:

npm install tailwindcss

Or with yarn:

yarn add tailwindcss

If you don’t have npm you can install Node.js since it comes with npm, or you can look at the yarn docs here under the alternatives section.

Once this is done you should see that the installation includes some folders in the static folder, some of which include:

  • node_modules/ : which is where the dependencies for tailwind reside.
  • package.json
  • yarn.lock (I used yarn)

Adding TailwindCss to our Flask App

The first step is to add some of the required files in order to get tailwindcss to work. To make things easier, we’ll create a new folder called src in the static folder from earlier, and in the src folder we’ll add a file called style.css, and this is where tailwindCss directives will go, as we will see in a bit.

To keep things clear the project folder structure should look as follows:

projectfolder/
   - app.py
   - templates/
   - static/
     - src/
       - style.css

In this style.css file we’ll add the following as stipulated by the Tailwindcss docs.

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

These are called preprocessor directives by the documentation, and you can think of them as you would preprocessor directives from a language like C++, these directives essentially paste in a lot of utility CSS classes during compile time (A lot!). The resulting CSS from this process is what we will link to our flask templates for styling.

Before we generate the CSS lets prepare a file where it should be dumped into. In the static folder we’ll create another new folder called css and in here all our stylesheets will go, including the one we’re about to generate. In this folder we’ll create a new file called main.css and this is where our tailwind utility classes will go.

Compiling the preprocessor directives to generate CSS

In order to generate, the CSS from the preprocessor directives, we’ll need to issue a command from the terminal using npx which is a tool that comes with npm (so ensure you have npm installed, you probably already do since Node.js is installed). Next we’ll run the following command to compile and output the result into the main.css for our usage.

npx tailwindcss -i ./src/style.css -o css/main.css

This would generate a lot of utility css classes for us to use in our server templates.

Building our Frontend template with TailwindCSS

Now that we have generated the tailwind css, we can now use the utility classes to style our templates. We’ll head over to the templates folder from earlier on, where we added the index.html file and edit it and add some more elements and styling to it using tailwindcss utility classes.

In index.html add the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Beans Love Beers</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{url_for('static',filename='css/main.css')}}">
</head>

<body>
  <div class="bg-green-300 px-3 py-1">
    <h2 class="text-3xl font-light text-white m-0">Beans Love Beers</h2>
  </div>
  <!-- Search Bar -->
  <div class="container">
    <input type="text" placeholder="Search for beer..."
      class="border-2 ml-64 border-gray-700 w-2/5 mt-10 py-3 px-4"></input>
    <button class="bg-blue-700 text-xl hover:bg-blue-500 text-white py-2 px-3">Search</button>
  </div>
  <!-- Selection -->
  <div class="container">
    <div class="grid gap-8 grid-cols-3 mt-5 ">
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/logo.jpg" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg"
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/Asset 140.png" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg"
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/Asset 150.png" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg"
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/Asset 160.png" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg"
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/logo.jpg" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg"
        class="transition duration-500 ease-in-out flex py-3 px-2 hover:bg-blue-400 transform hover:-translate-y-1 hover:scale-110 hover:text-white hover:shadow-none hover:rounded border border-gray-300 shadow-lg">
        <img src="img/Asset 150.png" class="h-16 w-12 mr-20 ml-8 mt-10" alt="Image">
        <div class="w-3/5 mr-0">
          <h2 class="text-gray-800 font-bold">Buzz</h2>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Dolore et excepturi autem iure molestias doloribus
            ipsa praesentium</p>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>

</body>

</html>

Observe the link to the CSS file points to the css/main.css file and not the pre-processed directives in the src/style.css file.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{url_for('static',filename='css/main.css')}}" />

Test running

Save the index file, and if the server is still running go to localhost:5000/index and you should see the updated index page looking better with the styling as shown below:

demo2

There you have it!

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve covered how to structure a simple Flask app to accomodate the TailwindCss package. We saw how to install Tailwindcss and how to generate CSS from its pre-processor directives into a file of our choosing. Finally, we saw how to use it in our flask templates.

You should now be able to install Tailwindcss into your Flask projects and integrate it successfully into your applications.While this article focuses on integrating Tailwindcss in a single module Flask app, you are not limited to integrating Tailwindcss in this manner or in single file flask apps only.

You can use Tailwindcss in more sophisticated structures such as blueprints. While making it available only for certain templates owned by a particular blueprint.

While still having the autonomy of using regular css-stylings in other templates. Therefore, I implore you to explore and experiment with Tailwindcss as you continue your journey as a Flask developer.

Happy coding!

Peer Review Contributions by: Daniel Katungi