tailwindcss-rails VS inertia-laravel

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.

This is (as far as I know) not documented and I had to dive into the sourcecode for both the inertia server runner and the Laravel command to start the server to understand what is going on. Here we go.

So here is a quick guide how to set up a new Rails 7 app using my favorite projects out there: Inertia and Svelte. You can also skip all this and download the endresult directly from here: https://github.com/buhrmi/rails7-starter

Might be interested in https://inertiajs.com/

Laravel Viltify is a heavily opinionated Laravel starter kit. It's intent is to seamlessly integrate Vue, Inertia.js, Laravel, TailwindCSS and Vuetify, so you don't waste your time learning how to do it and focus on writing your application, leaving setup behind.

Can't believe nobody recommended inertiajs here!

I would recommend InertiaJS for using Vue.js with Rails. It lets Rails continue to handle navigation so you don't have to replicate it client side. Same thing with views which gives you a very nice balance between an SPA and a fully server rendered app.

Now more than ever, it has become very easy to integrate React in your Laravel project, as opposed to before when one had to depend on APIs to connect the two stacks. This meant two different hosting environments and two Git repos to manage. But with InertiaJS we can build SPAs (single page apps) with your preferred front-end in one single project without need for APIs. Inertia has support for React, Vue or Svelte to use in your front-end. You pass data in your controllers as in any ordinary Laravel project, only difference is you're now rendering your views as JavaScript elements instead of blade. This can be done in two ways:

Awesome. I’m noticing a ton of “alternative” front end development tools these days: Hotwire, Stimulus Reflex, LiveView, Livewire, etc.

However I don’t think javascript is the fundamental blocker. When people say they dislike building SPAs, they probably mean they dislike APIs and the whole circus of double validations, error catching, form handling and cache invalidations that come with a React/Vue SPA.

Inertiajs[1] is a really solid middle ground of MVC goodness and client side interactivity.

[1] - https://inertiajs.com