Styling

Clace supports working with Classless CSS libraries and also with TailwindCSS and DaisyUI. To use this, add the directive

app.star
    style=ace.style("daisyui")

in the app definition. The fields in the ace.style structure are:

Property	Optional	Type	Default	Notes
library	false	string		The library to use, url to classless library, “tailwindcss” or “daisyui”
themes	true	string[]	[]	The daisyui themes to include
disable_watcher	true	bool	false	Whether to disable the tailwind watcher process startup in dev mode

Classless CSS

If the library property is a url, it should point to a publicly accessible style file. The style file is downloaded into the static/gen/css/style.css file. The file is automatically included as part of the clace_gen_import template.

For example,

app.star
    style=ace.style("https://unpkg.com/mvp.css@1.14.0/mvp.css"),

imports the MVP.css library. Since this is classless, no changes are required in the HTML templates.

TailwindCSS

To use TailwindCSS, in app settings, add

app.star
    style=ace.style("tailwindcss")

Tailwind CSS works by scanning the HTML files for class names, generating the corresponding styles and then writing them to a static CSS file. A watcher process is started when an app using Tailwind is loaded in dev mode. The output of the watcher is written to static/gen/css/style.css file. This file is automatically included as part of the clace_gen_import template.

To ensure that the tailwind watcher is started, the tailwind CLI needs to be installed manually. The standalone CLI can be used. If using DaisyUI, use this custom build of the standalone CLI with DaisyUI included.

The Clace server config file has the following entries:

clace.toml
[system]
tailwindcss_command = "npx tailwindcss"
file_watcher_debounce_millis = 300

tailwindcss_command is the command use to start the watcher. If the standalone version is being used change to

clace.toml
[system]
tailwindcss_command = "/path/to/tailwindcss"

file_watcher_debounce_millis is used to prevent repeated reloads of the application files during dev mode. On slower machine, this value might have to be increased, but setting it too high will cause the reload to be slower.

DaisyUI

To use DaisyUI, in app settings, add

app.star
    style=ace.style("daisyui", themes=["dark"])

Change to the preferred theme. DaisyUI is a good option to use to get great default styling for components, with the full flexibility of Tailwind. To use DaisyUI, use the npm version of Tailwind or use this custom version of the standalone CLI with DaisyUI included. Clace takes care of creating the config files. Using the CDN version of DaisyUI or Tailwind is not recommended since that will cause the style files to be large.

Templates JavaScript