
s2k
Agile Web Development with Rails 7: Reloading assets in development mode
Hi all,
currently I wonder how the Tailwind colours work (or don’t work).
For example, in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
I have this:
<header class="bg-green-600">
and, yes, the header part is indeed green.
But when I change it to, for example
<header class="bg-sky-600">
and reload the page, the background is white. Why is that?
I assumed the examples from the Tailwind docs at https://tailwindcss.com/docs/background-color, can be used elsewhere (read: my local app).
And while that’s true from some of the named colours, it is not for others.
‘bg-blue-700’ yields a strong blue, ‘bg-orange-500’ & ‘bg-fuchsia-600’ is white. A ‘one-off’ colour is also displayed white (or ignored?).
After running
bin/rails assets precompile
these colours are displayed in the browser.
What causes this behaviour? Can it be changed, to get all the colours Tailwind has in store (e.g. also the ‘one-off’ colours such as class="bg-[#50d71e]"
(also from the Tailwind docs)?
Cheers
Stephan
Marked As Solved

s2k
Aha, now I see were I went wrong: While, I usually default to using Foreman, I used bin/rails server
, which doesn’t watch for Tailwind related changes, while the Procfile.dev
does.
It’s nice that bin/dev
even installs foreman
if it isn’t already there.
Also Liked

rubys
Short answer: stop your server, run rails assets:clobber
, and restart your server.
I guess the question I have to ask: why did you run bin/rails assets:precompile
? What that does is to create a static snapshot of your tailwind classes and put the results into your public/assets
directory. If that directory exists when the server is started, puma will serve those files and never forward the request to rails at all. The end result is any tailwind classes you try to make use of will be ignored unless they are in that static snapshot.

rubys
What I did to reproduce the problem:
rails new play --css tailwind
cd play
rails generate scaffold say hello
bin/dev
Adding bg-green-600
to app/views/say/hello.html.erb
worked at this point.
Stopping the server, running rails assets:precompile
, restarting the server, and then changing the color to bg-sky-600
did not work - the background was white – this matched what you reported.
Stopping the server, running rails assets:clobber
, and restarting the server, and I can see the new color. I can then change the color to bg-red-600
and see the results of my change.
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