Problem statement

You have a Next.JS project with tailwindcss.
You want to build a component that receives your custom color names via props

export type Props = {
  // […]
  color?: 'primary' | 'secondary' | 'success' | 'error' | 'warning';
  // […]
};

and should colorize the component accordingly in a dynamic fashion.

Your component is now supposed to build css class names on the fly but tailwindcss will NOT pick these up because they do not compile your code but merely run regular expressions for every static file specified in the contents array in the tailwind.config.js. (source: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/content-configuration#configuring-source-paths)

Solutions

There exist two solutions to this problem and both have their caveats.

1. Writing a color lookup table

You write a function that takes your dynamic color name - e.g. primary, secondary, and so on - and return the bare css class string. Make sure to have this file in your contents array so that tailwind can pick up these classes.
The caveats are fairly obvious with this approach:

1. The method explodes in length due to the permutation set of class-combinations: $\text{pseudo}\times\text{prefix}\times\text{colorName}\times\text{intensity}$
   • You can use gen-tailwind-cmap.js to generate a function to lookup your dynamic css class names. Run it with
2. Tailwind will end up generating all classes in your final bundle.

Optimally, you want to be concise and only list the classes you really need in your components to circumvent the caveats at the cost of development speed. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/69687962/2402281 as a reference.

2. Safelisting your classes

By safelisting, you force tailwindcss to pick up the dynamic classnames which are not in your static code files. The caveat here is that this might bloat your bundle with non-existent css classes that tailwind has to manage. From the docs:

For the smallest file size and best development experience, we highly recommend relying on your content configuration to tell Tailwind which classes to generate as much as possible. Safelisting is a last-resort, and should only be used in situations where it’s impossible to scan certain content for class names. These situations are rare, and you should almost never need this feature. If you need to make sure Tailwind generates certain class names that don’t exist in your content files, use the safelist option:

and

One example of where this can be useful is if your site displays user-generated content and you want users to be able to use a constrained set of Tailwind classes in their content that might not exist in your own site’s source files.

Source: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/content-configuration#safelisting-classes

---

Keywords: #tailwind #dynamic #class #names #className