How to Create a Next.js Application with Tailwind CSS and TypeScript

4 min readDec 2, 2022

Introduction

Next.js is a popular framework for building server-rendered React applications. It offers a powerful set of features and a simple development experience that makes it easy for developers to create and deploy high-performance web applications.

In this article, we will learn how to create a Next.js application and use Tailwind CSS and TypeScript to add styling and type safety to the application. Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that makes it easy to build custom user interfaces, and TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that adds type checking and type annotations to the language.

Prerequisites:

Before getting started, you should have the following tools installed on your computer:

Node.js: This is a JavaScript runtime that is required to run Next.js applications. You can download and install Node.js from the official website here.
npm: This is the default package manager for Node.js. It is used to install and manage dependencies for your Next.js application.
npx: This is a command-line utility that is included with npm. It is used to run npm packages, including the Next.js CLI.

Creating a Next.js application

To create a new Next.js application, you can use the Next.js CLI. To do this, open a terminal window and run the following command:

npx create-next-app my-app

This will create a new Next.js application in a directory called my-app. The application will be scaffolded with some basic boilerplate code, including a simple index.js file and a pages directory that contains a default home page.

To start the application, navigate to the my-app directory and run the following command:

npm run dev

This will start the Next.js development server and open the application in your default web browser. You should see a simple “Hello, world” page that indicates that the application is running successfully.

Adding Tailwind CSS

To add Tailwind CSS to your Next.js application, you will first need to install the tailwindcss npm package. To do this, run the following command in the my-app directory:

npm install tailwindcss

Next, you will need to create a Tailwind configuration file. This file defines the default styles and settings for your application. To create the configuration file, run the following command:

npx tailwindcss init

This will create a tailwind.config.js file in the root directory of your application. You can edit this file to customize the default styles and settings for your application.

Next, you will need to create a CSS file that imports Tailwind CSS and applies the default styles to your application. To do this, create a new file called styles.css in the pages directory and add the following code:

@import "tailwindcss/base";
@import "tailwindcss/components";
@import "tailwindcss/utilities";

This code imports the base, components, and utilities styles from Tailwind CSS and applies them to your application.

To use the CSS file in your application, you will need to import it in the _app.js file, which is the top-level component that wraps all of your application's pages. To do this, open the _app.js file and add the following line at the top of the file:

import '../styles.css';

This will import the styles.css file and apply the default Tailwind CSS styles to your application.

To see the changes in your application, you will need to restart the development server. To do this, stop the server by pressing CTRL+C in the terminal window, and then run the npm run dev command again to start the server.

Adding TypeScript

To add TypeScript to your Next.js application, you will first need to install the typescript npm package. To do this, run the following command in the my-app directory:

npm install typescript

Next, you will need to create a TypeScript configuration file. This file defines the default settings for your application. To create the configuration file, run the following command:

npx tsc --init

This will create a tsconfig.json file in the root directory of your application. You can edit this file to customize the default settings for your application.

Next, you will need to rename your JavaScript files to TypeScript files. For example, you can rename the index.js file to index.tsx and the _app.js file to _app.tsx. The .tsx extension indicates that the files contain TypeScript code that includes JSX, which is a syntax extension for React.

To use TypeScript in your application, you will need to update the import statements in your files to reference the new file names. For example, in the _app.tsx file, you will need to update the import statement for the App component to reference the index.tsx file instead of the index.js file.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to create a Next.js application and use Tailwind CSS and TypeScript to add styling and type safety to the application. We saw how to install the required packages and create the necessary configuration files, and we learned how to update our application to use these tools.

By using Tailwind CSS and TypeScript, developers can easily add custom styles and type checking to their Next.js applications, which can improve the developer experience and the overall quality of the application. I hope this article was helpful for those who are new to using these tools with Next.js. Happy coding!

If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more about the Typescript developer ecosystem, be sure to follow me on Twitter at @0xSolidititty for regular updates and insights.

Bibliography:

Next.js: https://nextjs.org/
Tailwind CSS: https://tailwindcss.com/
TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/
Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/
npx: https://www.npmjs.com/package/npx