How to setup FastAPI with Tailwind CSS

Introduction

In this post I’ll share with you, how to setup FastAPI(my favorite web framework) with Tailwind CSS(my favorite CSS Framework).

Useful Links

A YouTube tutorial I’ve made can be found here ht tps://youtu.be/yrEKYkIK-Fw.

The GitHub repo can be found here https://github.com/vicsejas/fastapi-with-tailwindcss.git.

Feel free to contact me on x(twitter). if you have any questions.

Instructions

Now let’s begin with our project.

1.- Setup your FastAPI project

First we will need to setup our FastAPI project by installing.

FastAPI

pip install fastapi

ASGI Server

pip install "uvicorn[standard]"

Templating Engine

Our templating engine for this example will be Jinja2.

pip install Jinja2

2.- Return HTML from your FastAPI route

Now inside our project we need to

Create a “templates” folder in your project

Inside this folder create a “base.html” file

Add the TemplateResponse to your route response

from fastapi import FastAPI, Request
from fastapi.templating import Jinja2Templates

app=FastAPI()

templates=Jinja2Templates(directory="templates")

@app.get("/")
async def index(request:Request):
    return templates.TemplateResponse("base.html",{"request":request})

3.- Create a “tailwindcss” folder on your project

Here we will be adding the TailwindCSS files

4.- Install TailwindCSS

Start a new terminal inside your project folder and run the following command, with the package manager you’d like to use

npm

npm install tailwindcss

pnpm

pnpm install tailwindcss

yarn

yarn add tailwindcss

5.- Create a “tailwind.config.js” file

This file will be used to configure TailwindCSS, and make sure you include in content the relative path to your templates folder

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: ["../templates/**/*.html"],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
}

6.- Create a new folder “styles” inside your tailwindcss folder

Here we will be adding our custom styles, by creating a new file “styles.css” and adding the base directives

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

7.- Run the TailwindCSS CLI build process

This proccess will generate an “app.css” file inside a new “static/css” folder.

The “—watch” flag will make sure that the styles are updated every time you make a change in your html files.

npx tailwindcss -i ./styles/app.css -o ../static/css/app.css --watch

8.- Add the TailwindCSS stylesheet to your base.html file

Mount the static folder

In order to mount this folder we need to add the following lines to our main.py file

Import the static files

from fastapi.staticfiles import StaticFiles

Add the static folder to your app

app.mount("/static", StaticFiles(directory="static"), name="static")

Now we can add the stylesheet to our base.html file

<link href="{{url_for('static',path='/css/app.css')}}" rel="stylesheet">

9.- Serving compressed files with the GZip middleware

In order to serve compressed files we need to import the middleware

from fastapi.middleware.gzip import GZipMiddleware

add the middleware to your app

app.add_middleware(GZipMiddleware)

Script for running the TailwindCSS CLI build process

We can create a script in the package.json file to run the TailwindCSS CLI build process

"scripts": {
    "dev": "npx tailwindcss -i ./styles/app.css -o ../static/css/app.css --watch"
},

And then simply run

npm

npm run dev

pnpm

pnpm dev

yarn

yarn dev

to run the Tailwind CSS build process.

and that’s it, you have now successfully setup Tailwind CSS with FastAPI.