Offline documentation of tailwindcss in 5 easy steps

In this post, let's build the offline documentation for tailwindcss, my favorite utility first CSS framework, and my go to CSS framework for rapidly prototyping a design.

Getting the source code

The documentation for tailwindcss is available on tailwindcss.com website. We can easily find the source code for this website on github through a simple google search. It is hosted on github at https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com.

Let us first download the source code and inspect.

git clone https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com
cd tailwindcss.com

Open the code editor of your choice. If using vscode, just enter

code .

Understanding the tech stack

If we look at the files in the root directory, we can understand that

1. next.config.js - The website is written in nextjs
2. tailwind.config.js - The website is build using tailwindcss as the CSS framework (what else you expect?)
3. yarn.lock - using yarn as the package manager

For understanding the deployment process of nextjs, we can simply go to its corresponding documentation website. You can find the information in below links.

1. Deployment | Next.js
2. Advanced features: Static HTML Export | Next.js

package.json

Once you gain enough info on how deployment works, let's open package.json file and see if we have the required scripts already present. Luckily, we have the script export for generating static files. Our life has been made easier already.

Commands

Now we have enough information to generate the documentation.

1. Install all the dependencies using the yarn package manager.

   yarn install
   

2. Run the build script using

   yarn export
   

   This will generate the required static HTML, js, css and all assets in the out folder.

3. Serve the documentation generated in out folder

   cd out
   python -m http.server # simpler
   # Or if you prefer nodejs
   yarn global add serve
   serve
   

Congratulations! 👏 💐 We now have tailwindcss documentation available offline.

Pro tip for vscode users

jsconfig.json

If you have the following directory structure

Home
\- components
   |- A.js
   |- B.js

utils
\- utils.js

and want to import utils.js in A.js, you need to use relative paths as follows

import utils from "../../utils/utils.js";

This makes it harder to follow the file being imported, and once you have a folder structure 3 or more levels deep, this makes it even harder to write the required imports keeping in mind all the folders.

jsconfig.json to the rescue!

You can use "compilerOptions" > "paths" dictionary to define the path mappings relative to the root of the project.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "paths": {
      "@/utils/*": ["utils/*"],
      "@/home/*": ["Home/components/*"]
    }
  }
}

Now instead of all those relative paths to import utils, you can simply use

import utils from "@/utils/utils.js";

to import the utils, and to import A.js in any other file, we can write

import A from "@/home/A.js";

You can see this jsconfig.json file being used in the tailwindcss.com project. Go inspect the source code and have fun learning new things.

Happy coding!