CLI

./vendor/bin/tailwindphp is a PHP port of @tailwindcss/cli with no Node.js required. It takes the same build options, apart from source maps (--map), but scans content differently: see What the CLI scans. After composer require tailwindphp/tailwindphp, the binary is linked into vendor/bin/.

If you only need CSS at runtime from PHP, use the API instead — the CLI is for build-step workflows that write a stylesheet to disk.

Quick start

# Build CSS from an input file
./vendor/bin/tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css

# Watch for changes and rebuild
./vendor/bin/tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css --watch

# Build minified for production
./vendor/bin/tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css --minify

Options

tailwindphp [-i input.css] [-o output.css] [--watch] [options…]

Give long options their value with =: --input=./src/app.css, --output=./dist/styles.css, --cwd=/path/to/project. A space-separated value after a long option (--input ./src/app.css) is currently ignored without an error, and the build falls back to the defaults (#13). Short options take the value as the next argument (-i ./src/app.css).

When --output is - (the default), the compiled CSS is written to stdout, so you can pipe it elsewhere. Progress messages (the version banner and Done in …ms) go to stderr.

Unlike @tailwindcss/cli, there is no --map option: TailwindPHP does not generate source maps.

Input CSS

Create an app.css with your Tailwind import, theme, and directives:

@import "tailwindcss";

@theme {
    --color-brand: #3b82f6;
}

What the CLI scans

Content scanning in the CLI does not yet follow @source the way @tailwindcss/cli does (#8). In the current release:

• With no @source file directive in the input CSS, the CLI scans the working directory (--cwd) recursively. That includes vendor/ and node_modules/; .gitignore is not consulted.
• With one or more @source file directives, the CLI scans the input file's directory recursively. The path or glob in the directive is not applied: @source "../templates" next to src/app.css scans src/, not templates/.
• @source not "…" directives are skipped; they exclude nothing.
• @source inline("…") and @source not inline("…") work as documented, because the compiler handles them itself.

Only files with these extensions are read: php, html, htm, twig, blade.php, vue, jsx, tsx, svelte, astro, and mdx. Class names are taken from class and className attributes, the same as tw::extractCandidates(), so a class that only appears in a PHP or JavaScript string is not found. Force such classes in with @source inline("…").

Until that is fixed, the reliable setup is an input CSS file at the top of the directory you want scanned:

/* templates/app.css: scans templates/ recursively */
@import "tailwindcss";
@source "./";

See @source for the directive syntax, including the not and inline() forms.

Examples

# Build from an input file
tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css

# Build minified for production
tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css -m

# Watch mode with minification
tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css -w -m

# Run against a different working directory
tailwindphp -i app.css -o dist/styles.css --cwd=/path/to/project

The CLI creates the output directory if it does not exist, and exits with an error if the input file is missing or the input and output paths are identical. Watch mode polls the input file and the scanned files every 500 ms and rebuilds when one of them changes or a new file appears.

Global installation

Install globally to use tailwindphp from anywhere:

composer global require tailwindphp/tailwindphp

# Now available globally
tailwindphp -i ./src/app.css -o ./dist/styles.css

See Getting Started for project setup and the API for runtime CSS generation from PHP.