Unlock the Power of Tailwind CSS with daisyUI
Are you tired of sacrificing markup readability for the sake of scalability in your frontend applications? Look no further than daisyUI, a customizable Tailwind CSS component library that prioritizes clean HTML and performance.
What You’ll Need
Before we dive in, make sure you have:
- Basic knowledge of React and JavaScript
- Node.js and npm installed on your machine
- Basic knowledge of Tailwind CSS and utility classes
Getting Started
Let’s create a new React application using Create React App. Run the following command in your terminal:
npx create-react-app daisyui-app
Next, navigate into your project directory and start your development server:
cd daisyui-app && npm start
Installing Dependencies
With our new React project generated, let’s install the required dependencies:
- daisyUI: provides components for building and styling our application
- Tailwind CSS: provides utility classes for our daisyUI components
- PostCSS: used for styling JavaScript plugins
- Axios: handles API requests
Run the following code in your terminal:
npm install daisyui tailwindcss postcss axios
Configuring Tailwind CSS
Add the following code to your tailwind.config.js file:
module.exports = { theme: {}, variants: {}, plugins: [require('daisyui')] }
This includes daisyUI support in our Tailwind CSS configuration, providing access to Tailwind’s utility classes.
Building a Photo Gallery Application
In this section, we’ll build three components needed for our application: an Intro component, a Navbar component, and a Photo component.
Intro Component
Create an Intro component with an image URL from Unsplash and a background image for our application’s landing page:
import React from 'eact'; function Intro() { const imgURL = 'https://unsplash.com/photos/random'; return ( <div className="h-screen w-full bg-cover bg-center" style={{ backgroundImage:url(${imgURL})}}> <a href="https://unsplash.com/developers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Unsplash API </a> </div> ); }
Navbar Component
Build a simple Navbar component and add customization using daisyUI’s component classes:
import React from 'eact'; function Navbar() { return ( <nav className="flex justify-between items-center py-4"> <h1 className="font-bold text-lg">Photo Gallery</h1> </nav> ); }
Photo Component
Build a simple Photo component to render images fetched from Unsplash:
import React from 'eact'; function Photo({ imgURL }) { return ( <figure className="md:flex bg-white rounded-xl p-4 md:p-0"> <img src={imgURL} alt="Random photo from Unsplash" className="w-full h-full object-cover md:w-48 md:h-48" /> </figure> ); }
Fetching and Organizing Photos
Use our components to fetch random photos from our Unsplash API and create categories to organize them. Import our packages and initialize an app component:
import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'eact'; import Intro from './Intro'; import Navbar from './Navbar'; import Photo from './Photo'; function App() { const [categories, setCategories] = useState(['RANDOM', 'TECHNOLOGIES', 'ARTS', 'SPORTS', 'GAMES']); const [photos, setPhotos] = useState([]); // Fetch random photos from Unsplash API // Return a photo based on the photo category // Render an image and log any errors to the console }
With these components and functions in place, our application should now look similar to the image below:
The Power of daisyUI
By leveraging daisyUI’s component classes and Tailwind CSS utility classes, we’ve built a customizable and scalable React application without sacrificing markup readability. Take the knowledge gained from this tutorial and apply it to your own projects, enjoying the styling performance of Tailwind CSS without harming your code’s readability as you scale.