Tailwind CSS Compiler for Node.js

tailwindcss-node-compiler is a compiler for Tailwind CSS v4 and up. The compiler wraps the @tailwindcss/node package in a simple Node.js API and, thus, the compiler should be used through this API. The compiler uses Lightning CSS to transform and optimize the CSS code and allows you to pass custom options to Lightning CSS.

The primary motivation for this compiler is to be able to use Tailwind in Node.js without PostCSS as an intermediary. Although Tailwind itself now uses Lightning CSS to transform the CSS output, making PostCSS unnecessary, I didn’t find a good way to use Tailwind in Node.js without PostCSS.

In addition to that, neither Tailwind CLI nor Tailwind’s PostCSS plugin allow passing custom options to Lightning CSS. This compiler uses the same options as Tailwind by default but lets you to specify your own options to Lightning CSS. It is possible to run Lightning CSS with custom options on the output of the Tailwind-provided compilers but, as fast as Lightning CSS is, it is inefficient to run it needlessly.

Getting started

Install the package.

npm install -D tailwindcss-node-compiler

The package exports two functions, compile and compileFile. As you would expect, compile compiles the given CSS and compileFile reads the CSS from a file and compiles that. For now, you need to write the output wherever you want to.

compile

compile compiles CSS with Tailwind and optionally transforms it using Lightning CSS. The function returns the compiled CSS code. Please see index.ts for the function type.

compileFile

compileFile compiles a CSS file with Tailwind and optionally transforms it using Lightning CSS. The function returns the compiled CSS code. Please see index.ts for the function type.

License

This package is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Parts of the code are adapted from tailwindlabs/tailwindcss, licensed under the MIT License. That code is copyright (c) Tailwind Labs, Inc.