tailwindcss-rails VS importmap-rails

You can't use additional CSS packages (like Flowbite) with the official tailwindcss-rails gem. According to this answered issue, you should either give up importmap and use a bundler, or use a CSS file from CDN - which is not ideal (unnecessary classes won't be purged this way).

You first install your asset handlers as you need them for your project. They can be anything from rails/jsbundling-rails and rails/tailwindcss-rails to webpacker or something custom.

Preconfigured TailwindCSS from TailwindCSS-rails ready to use out of the box, pass --css tailwind as an option.✅

Thanks to the magic of Rails, the scaffold generator gives us almost everything we need to start creating messages and associating them with users. Because we are using Tailwind via the tailwindcss-rails gem, the scaffold generator also includes some nice looking base styles too.

Because we are using Tailwind via the tailwindcss-rails gem, the scaffold generator applies some basic Tailwind styling to generated views, so we have nice looking Widget pages right out of the box.

Here's a simple way to achieve this, inspired by the tailwindcss-rails gem.

For more documentation on tailwind installation: https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails

gem "rails", "~> 7.0.0" # The original asset pipeline for Rails [https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails] gem "sprockets-rails" # Use postgresql as the database for Active Record gem "pg", "~> 1.1" # Use the Puma web server [https://github.com/puma/puma] gem "puma", "~> 5.0" # Use JavaScript with ESM import maps [https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails] gem "importmap-rails" # Hotwire's SPA-like page accelerator [https://turbo.hotwired.dev] gem "turbo-rails" # Hotwire's modest JavaScript framework [https://stimulus.hotwired.dev] gem "stimulus-rails" # Use Tailwind CSS [https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails] gem "tailwindcss-rails" # Build JSON APIs with ease [https://github.com/rails/jbuilder] gem "jbuilder" gem "redis", "~> 4.0"

When you generate an app with rails new --css=tailwind without a JS option, you get the tailwindcss-rails gem which includes the new scaffold generators. When you pass in a JavaScript option as well, you get Tailwind installed via cssbundling-rails, which does not include built-in generators since it offers more than just Tailwind as an option.

With importmaps (https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails) and Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/), you write plain js and serve it.

Also packages are served via CDN. There is no tree shaking. Rails got rid of the whole bundling step.

Importmap audit - “checks the NPM registry for known security issues”

It worked, but JS changes were not coming through. Digging into the Importmap docs (see 'sweeping the cache', it monitors changes according to the setting config.importmap.cache_sweepers. So, by adding the locations where I have my JS files, I also got JS changes passed through.

You can't use TypeScript, or anything that requires pre-compile, with importmap. answered issue

Let's begin by installing the necessary dependencies. The first gem generates the importmap object, manages caching, and helps with library installations, among other things. I recommend reading the entire readme to become familiar with its capabilities. The second gem will be discussed later, it is used to compile JSX files. Gemfile

Yeah, those were brand new right around the time I started this project a few years ago with Rails 7 (or was it 6.1?). I actually ended up removing them in favor of importmap-rails since I wanted as simple of a frontend as possible and I wasn't sure of relying on what was, at the time, a brand new way of doing frontend work. Things change so quickly in JS-land that I'm always hesitant to make something a dependency unless it has a strong track record of being continuously maintained.

source "https://rubygems.org" git_source(:github) { |repo| "https://github.com/#{repo}.git" } ruby "3.1.0" # Bundle edge Rails instead: gem "rails", github: "rails/rails", branch: "main" gem "rails", "~> 7.0.4", ">= 7.0.4.2" # The original asset pipeline for Rails [https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails] gem "sprockets-rails" # Use sqlite3 as the database for Active Record gem "sqlite3", "~> 1.4" # Use the Puma web server [https://github.com/puma/puma] gem "puma", "~> 5.0" # Use JavaScript with ESM import maps [https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails] gem "importmap-rails" # Hotwire's SPA-like page accelerator [https://turbo.hotwired.dev] gem "turbo-rails" # Hotwire's modest JavaScript framework [https://stimulus.hotwired.dev] gem "stimulus-rails" # Build JSON APIs with ease [https://github.com/rails/jbuilder] gem "jbuilder" gem "mongoid" gem "mongoid-grid_fs" gem 'bootstrap', '~> 5.2.2' #sourced from https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-rubygem gem 'rack-cors' # Windows does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem gem "tzinfo-data", platforms: %i[ mingw mswin x64_mingw jruby ] # Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb gem "bootsnap", require: false

Also, installing StimulusReflex seems quite not easy for the moment: It seems there are some quirks along the way if you're using import-maps for managing javascript dependencies as I do. Embracing the Rails way at least prevents you from this sort of issue.

If you're using importmap-rails, you'll need to pin stimulus-multiselect: