Tails

Tails is a small set of utilities around working with tailwind class lists in Elixir.

Utilities

Classes

Classes takes a list of class lists or conditional class lists and returns a single class list. For example:

classes(["foo", "bar"])
# "foo bar"
classes(["foo": false, "bar": true])
# "bar"

Class lists are merged from right to left (i.e left is the base, right is the override). See the section on merging below

Merge

Merge takes a list of classes and semantically merges any tailwind classes it knows about, leaving the rest untouched. The first argument is treated as a base, and the second argument is treated as overrides.

For example

iex> merge("p-4", "p-2") |> to_string()
"p-2"
iex> merge("p-2", "p-4") |> to_string()
"p-4"
iex> merge("p-4", "px-2") |> to_string()
"px-2 py-4"
iex> merge("font-bold", "font-thin") |> to_string()
"font-thin"
iex> merge("font-normal text-black hover:text-primary-light-300", "text-primary-600 dark:text-primary-dark-400 font-bold") |> to_string()
"font-bold text-primary-600 dark:text-primary-dark-400 hover:text-primary-light-300"

This merge is a "allow-list" style merge, meaning classes that we haven't thought about and/or aren't aware of a good merge strategy are just added to the end of the class list. We should have covered the tailwind spec pretty well as of March 2023.

See the module docs for Tails to see what we currently handle

Configuration

No Merge Classes

Set config :tails, :no_merge_classes, [:foo, :bar] to avoid merging a specific set of classes. Can be useful as an escape hatch if tails is doing the wrong thing.

Colors

When working with LiveViewNative, or in-line-styling emails, for example, you will likely want access to your tailwind colors. However, tailwind won't work in those cases. To that end, you can configure a colors.json file, which you would also reference in your tailwind.config.

Then, Tails would define a function for each color.

# in config.exs
config :tails, colors_file: Path.join(File.cwd!(), "assets/tailwind.colors.json")

// in tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  mode: "jit",
  content: ["./js/**/*.js", "../lib/*_web/**/*.*ex"],
  darkMode: "class",
  theme: {
    extend: {
      colors: require("./tailwind.colors.json")
    },
  }
};

// in tailwind.colors.json
{
  "silver-phoenix": "#EAEBF3",
  "base-dark": {
    "DEFAULT": "#5E627D",
    "50": "#C2C4D1",
    ...
  },
  ...
}

This would define Tails.silver_phoenix(), Tails.base_dark() and Tails.base_dark_50(), which return the respective hash code colors.