Introduction

This is a pretty much straight-forward Tailwind plugin that allows you to expose Tailwind's colors and their shades, including any custom ones included in your own theme, as custom CSS properties on the :root element. This can be useful for maintaining a consistent color theme across your project and easily accessing Tailwind colors in your stylesheets.

Requirements

This plugin is built upon TailwindCSS. Therefore, TailwindCSS v3.0.0 is at least required. Get started here.

It's also recommended that you have a basic understanding of CSS and how to install Tailwind plugins. Learn more about Tailwind plugins here.

Install

Install the plugin from npm:

npm i -D @tailwind-plugin/expose-colors

Then add the plugin to your tailwind.config.js file:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  theme: {
    // ...
  },
  plugins: [
    require('@tailwind-plugin/expose-colors'),
    // ...
  ],
}

Usage options

extract

| Option | Type | Default | Description | | --------- | ----------------- | ------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | extract | string \| Array | 'all' | Specify the color keys as an array to extract. Use 'all' to extract all colors or provide an array of all color keys. |

📌 You can extract colors from Tailwind's default color palette, or your custom ones declared in your theme.

⚠️ Exposing 'all' Tailwind's colors, will increase the filesize of your bundled CSS file by 7.76 kB

Example:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  theme: {
    colors: {
      // your custom colors
      midnight: '#121063',
      tahiti: {
        100: '#cffafe',
        200: '#a5f3fc',
        300: '#67e8f9',
        // ...
      },
    },
    // ...
  },
  plugins: [
    require('@tailwind-plugin/expose-colors')({
      extract: ['yellow', 'blue', 'midnight', 'tahiti'],
    }),
    // ...
  ],
}

Exposed colors:

  ::root {
    --tw-yellow-50: #FEFCE8;
    --tw-yellow-100: #FEF9C3;
    --tw-yellow-200: #FEF08A;
    ...
    --tw-midnight: #121063;
    --tw-tahiti-100: #CFFAFE;
    --tw-tahiti-200: #A5F3FC;
    --tw-tahiti-300: #67E8F9;
    ...
  }

prefix

| Option | Type | Default | Description | | -------- | -------- | ------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | | prefix | string | --tw | Customize the prefix for CSS variables. The default prefix is --tw. |

Example:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  // ...
  plugins: [
    require('@tailwind-plugin/expose-colors')({
      prefix: '--color',
    }),
  ],
}

Exposed colors:

  ::root {
    --color-midnight: #121063;
    --color-tahiti-100: #CFFAFE;
    --color-tahiti-200: #A5F3FC;
    --color-tahiti-300: #67E8F9;
    ...
  }

mode

| Option | Type | Default | Description | | ------ | ---------------- | ------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | mode | 'hex' \| 'rgb' | hex | Choose the color mode for extracted colors. Use 'hex' for hexadecimal colors or 'rgb' for RGB colors. |

Example:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  // ...
  plugins: [
    require('@tailwind-plugin/expose-colors')({
      mode: 'rgb',
    }),
  ],
}

Exposed colors:

  ::root {
    --tw-midnight: 18, 16, 99;
    --tw-tahiti-100: 207, 250, 254;
    --tw-tahiti-200: 165, 243, 252;
    --tw-tahiti-300: 103, 232, 249;
    ...
  }

The exposed variable colors will be in 'rgb' format so you can use them like so:

.myclass {
  background: rgba(var(--tw-tahiti-500), 0.8);
}

Authors

Based on Merott Movahedi's and Rafael R. Camargo's snippet. Developed, modified and maintained by George Cht.

• George Cht (@GeorgeCht)
• Merott Movahedi (@Merott)
• Rafael R. Camargo (@rafaelrcamargo)

License

MIT License