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Introducing the New SolidJS and Tailwind CSS Starter Kit

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

We are delighted to announce our SolidJS + Tailwind Starter Kit on Starter.dev to help you build your next project with SolidJS and Tailwind CSS in no time. In this article, we will walk you through the kit, and how it is a great option for building your next project. This kit has been designed to build tiny and optimized web applications on both the JavaScript and CSS sides. It's very useful when the load time of your application's files is critical, like when the internet connection is slow or when you are building a mobile application for a targeted audience.

Why SolidJS?

SolidJS is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It lets you build web applications using a declarative API that you’re already familiar with. It’s a great alternative to React, Vue, and other popular JavaScript frameworks. It’s also a great choice for building static sites. The best feature of SolidJS is how tiny its build bundles are. It helps you ship less JavaScript to the browser.

Why Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces. It makes it easy to build complex UIs without having to write custom CSS. And the best feature of Tailwind CSS is how customizable it is. It helps you ship a very small CSS file to the browser.


Starter Kit Features

  • SolidJS - A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
  • Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • Vite - A build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects.
  • Storybook - An open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular.
  • Vitest - A fast and simple test runner for Vite.
  • TypeScript - A typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS makes it easy to build complex UIs without having to write custom CSS. The best feature of Tailwind CSS is how customizable it is. It helps you ship a very small CSS file to the browser. Also, Tailwind CSS is great at scale, so you can add as many utilities as you want.

Storybook

Storybook is an open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, Angular, and others. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient. It also helps you build components faster, and reuse them in your projects. It also helps you document your components. This kit comes with Storybook pre-configured. You can start using it right away.

Why Vite?

Vite is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It's a great alternative to Webpack. It's fast and easy to use. It also helps you ship less JavaScript to the browser. It's a great choice for building static sites. This kit comes with Vite pre-configured. You can start using it right away.

Testing

This kit comes with Vitest pre-configured. Vitest is a tool that is built with Vite in mind from the start, taking advantage of its improvements in DX, like its instant Hot Module Reload (HMR). This is Vitest, a blazing fast unit-test framework powered by Vite. It's a great alternative to Jest. It's fast and easy to use.

How to get started?

  • Run npx @this-dot/create-starter to start a new project from one of the kits in the Starter CLI library.
  • Select the SolidJS, Tailwind kit from the CLI library options
  • Name your project
  • cd into your project directory and install dependencies using the tool of your choice (npm, yarn or pnpm)
  • Copy the contents of the .env.example file into a .env file

When to use this kit?

This kit is a great alternative to React and SCSS. It focuses on performance and developer experience by providing a fast and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It also helps you write less CSS, and less JavaScript.

Options to scale the kit to fit your needs

In this section, we will walk you through the options you have to scale the kit even further to fit your needs. We didn't want to add too many options to the kit in order to keep it simple and easy to use, but we also wanted to provide you with the ability to scale the kit.

PWA

PWA is a great way to make your app available offline, and installable on mobile devices. It caches your app's assets to make it load faster. It also helps you build a great user experience, and increase your app's engagement by providing push notifications. If you want to add PWA support to the kit, you can use the PWA Vite Plugin to add PWA support to the kit. It covers the PWA integrations for Vite, and the ecosystem with zero-configuration and is framework-agnostic.

Conclusion

So as we discussed in this article this SolidJS starter kit is a great way to start your new SolidJS project because it has most of the tools you need installed and preconfigured for you from Storybook to Testing, and even the PWA configurations. We hope you enjoyed this article, and we hope you will enjoy using the kit. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or Contact form.

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