Jekyll & Tailwind CSS Boilerplate

A bare bones Jekyll site which comes preconfigured to use Tailwind CSS for styling.

Features

🤍 Ships free of styling or theming. You can:
- Add a theme
- Get started with Tailwind CSS
- Use the Tailwind Typography plugin (see example)
📈 Ships Google Analytics and SEO ready
🍕 Dev mode: your Jekyll site is refreshed on file changes and all Tailwind CSS classes are available for use.
💻 Release mode: CSS is optimised by striping out unused classes and minifying the file.

👟 Install

Ensure Ruby and node (v12.13+) are installed then setup the project:

npm run setup

Configure Jekyll via _config.yml:

Add your site title and description
Add your google anlaytics ID
Add seo config via jekyll-seo-tag docs

🍕 Develop

npm start

Open your page on localhost:4000. Parcel and Jekyll will run concurrently so file changes update automatically.

⚠️ CSS might not render on the very first load. ⚠️

Simply open styles/index.css in your local text editor, save the file to trigger an update, wait until Parcel/Jekyll update, then refresh your browser.

Jekyll and Parcel run concurrently in dev builds so the CSS may not generate in time. This only happens once (when the file doesn't exist) and is not an issue in prod builds.

💻 Release

npm run build

Tailwind CSS is minified and Jekyll outputs the site to the _site folder.

Deploy statically (e.g. Netlify) with the following build settings:

Command: npm run build
Directory: _site

Packages

Here are the docs for packages used in this boilerplate:

Jekyll - The static site generator
Jekyll seo - Adds seo tags to your pages
Parcel - The bundler that builds Tailwind
Tailwind CSS - Provides utility classes to style pages instead of CSS
Tailwind typography plugin - Makes Tailwind work nicely with markdown

🤔 FAQ

What is the tailwindcss-typography plugin and do I need it?

By default Tailwind normalises styles so headings, paragraphs, etc. look the same
But Jekyll is often used for blogs and other text heavy site where you often want default text styles
The typography plugin solves this and brings nice default styles to markdown generated content
It's completely optional and easy to activate for specific content via the prose classes
Note that it adds ~20kB to your final CSS file in prod. This isn't huge but is good to remove if you don't need it
To remove it simply delete it from the plugins section in your tailwind.config.js file

Why are CSS file changes slow to update?

When you update the index.css file all Tailwind classes have to regenerate (via Parcel) which can take up to ~10 secs
In practise this isn't a common problem as most people don't update the file that often
If you are writing custom CSS then you can add non-Tailwind CSS files and add refer to them in the head.html file directly which skips the Parcel build process

Styles don't load when I build then open index.html locally

CSS may not load if you open the _site/index.html file directly in you local browser
To see the final site run jekyll serve and open the local server url (localhost:4000)
This should not be a problem when deployed to a server

Some of my styles disappear when deployed

Jekyll markdown may generate elements that are being purged by Tailwind CSS. See these docs to whitelist elements or configure PurgeCSS further
Don't build up class names like "my" + "-class". Use full names like "my-class" instead
Don't whitelist the _site/ folder as this folder is not guaranteed to exist when deployed to a server

Have another issue?

Contact me by posting an issue. I'll be happy to help 🙂

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