I spent a few hours tonight weighing my options to port a few websites from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS.
I started with what seems to be the original awssat/tailwindo project is a PHP console app whose goal was to convert any Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS and was last updated three years ago. I couldn’t get it to work from the console or via Docker, so I punted and looked at other options.
This led me to the node-tailwindo project, which did install successfully for me. node-tailwindo project hadn’t been updated in six years, so much has changed in both projects.
Since node-tailwindo was installed successfully and seemed to run OK, I ran it on a few projects, including Django Packages, and the results were not terrible. They were not amazing, but things worked.
I looked at commercial options, and they fall into either Browser Extensions that let you view an existing website with a copy/convert to Tailwind CSS option or tools that rewrite your existing CSS. Neither felt like a good option to me.
I finally did what any Python developer would and installed BeautifulSoup4. Next, I wrote a script to read all the files in a template folder, and it extracted all the class attributes from the existing HTML. One hundred seventy-six unique classes later, I had my answer.
Writing my upgrade tool felt like a bigger project that I wanted to take on, but it helped me spot a few issues that node-tailwindo would struggle with.
This is where BeautifulSoup4 shines, and I could quickly swap out a few classes before I fed them into node-tailwindo, and it fixes several bugs where the project was confused by {% block %} and {{ variable }} tags/blocks.
This might be a project; I slowly update as I get bored since I can probably add and test 10 to 20 tests over lunch. For a brief minute, I debated if this would be my first Rust app. Spoiler: It is not.
