Modular Styles

Implements CSS Modules for any SPA framework, especially in other languages than JavaScript!

Right now, the simplest solution to use CSS Modules consists of instantiating Webpack, and running everything through it. Doing things like import styles from 'stylesheet.module.css'. But what if you’re not running Webpack? What if you’re using another language that is not supported by Webpack? Or a language which don’t have access to require? Well, unless your build tool includes CSS Modules itself, you’re stuck with classic CSS. Or maybe with SASS. But we can do better now! PostCSS is here, it’s time to do better things!

The idea behind Modular Styles is to give access to PostCSS and all of the future features of CSS, right now, for all languages and frameworks.

How does it work?

Modular Styles uses the power of PostCSS and Gulp to provide an easy way to compile your CSS into usable CSS for any browser.

• First, all CSS is gathered though Gulp.
• Everything is processed by PostCSS to activate the future features of CSS.
• Optionally, the files processed can be dumped somewhere in your project.
• In parallel, all files get an interface in JSON, with the corresponding CSS Modules names from the stylesheets, converted into your favorite language interface.
• All files get concatenated into one.
• This file is finally processed by cssnano in order to remove code duplication.
• Finally, just include the resulting file into your HTML template, and enjoy using all the features of CSSNext!

At the end, you end up with two parts: a styles.css stylesheet, containing all the converted CSS, and a bunch of interfaces into multiple files, corresponding to each stylesheet, such as navbar.cljs, main.cljs, etc.

What does Modular Styles support?

For now, the package has been written for ClojureScript, in use with shadow-cljs. It fully supports ClojureScript and CSS Modules. It is thought to also handle all PostCSS plugins according to the project dependencies.

How does it work?

Modular Styles exists in two flavors: the CLI, and the API, in order to integrate easily with all flows, whether they are NPM scripts or more advanced processes.

Installation

npm install --save-dev modular-styles
# For Yarn users
yarn add --dev modular-styles

Additional Set-up

To start using modular styles, you need to prepare several things.

Install PostCSS plugins and configure it:

npm install --save-dev <list of PostCSS plugins>
# For Yarn users
yarn add --dev <list of PostCSS plugins>

Example:

npm install --save-dev postcss-import postcss-preset-env
# For Yarn users
yarn add --dev postcss-import postcss-preset-env

For configuration look at the dedicated section.

Prepare NPM scripts

{
  "scripts": {
    "watch-styles": "<your styles watching script>",
    "build-styles": "<your styles building script>"
  }
}

To write scripts either use CLI (example) or JavaScript (example).

Usage

Before the development, open a dedicated terminal window and run:

npm run watch-styles
# For Yarn users
yarn watch-styles

This command will bring to foreground watching process rebuilding your CSS on every file save.

CLI

modular-styles [command] <options>

[command] should either be compile or watch. The compile command runs the program once, compiles everything and shutdown. When using watch, the program constantly watches for every source file change and rebuilds everything each time to ensure you’re always up to date.

Some options are required, some are not. Many configuration options are available to suit your needs.

• --files <filesPath> should point to your CSS files. You can also just indicate your src path if you don’t have a specific stylesheets folder.
• --dest <destPath> should point to where you want to put your interfaces once generated.
• --source <sourcePath> should point to the correct source path of your interfaces. In ClojureScript, every interface gets compiled with a (ns package.name.path) interface. The sourcePath allows to find the base path. Some smarter things could be done for those languages.
• --extension <extension> should be your stylesheets extension. Defaults to css.
• --tempCSS <tempCSS> should point to the path for stylesheets without minification dumping.
• --bundleName <bundleName> is the name for the resulting CSS bundle. Defaults to styles.css.
• --bundlePath <bundleCSSPath> is the path for the resulting CSS bundle. Defaults to public.
• --lang <language> is the language in which you want your CSS modules to be converted. Defaults to cljs. Supports elm as well.

You probably will end up with something like:

modular-styles watch --source src --dest src/project_name/styles --files src/styles

This means all files into src/styles will be converted into one public/styles.css file.

API

const modularStyles = require('modular-styles')

const options = {
  sourcePath: 'src',
  filesPath: 'src/styles',
  destPath: 'src/project_name/styles',
  extension: 'css',
  bundleName: 'styles.css',
  bundleCSSPath: 'public',
  tempCSS: 'public/css',
  language: 'cljs',
}

// Use once.
modularStyles.compile(options)

// Or watch all files.
modularStyles.watch(options)

The options are the same as below.

PostCSS configurations

You can use any plugin you want for PostCSS. Just add them to your package.json, create a .postcssrc.json, a .postcssrc.js or a postcss.config.js, and add your plugins and options directly into this file.

Like so:

// .postcss.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    'postcss-import': {},
    'postcss-preset-env': {
      stage: 1,
    },
  },
}

This way, all the plugins and options are transferred to PostCSS.

How does the class name extraction work?

After the compilation of your CSS, PostCSS allows you to do what you want with the JSON interfaces it provides. By default, it extracts all the information and dumps them into the correct ClojureScript file. It is really easy to write another function to convert the JSON into another language.

An example?

For Elm, unfortunately, we didn’t have examples yet. But for ClojureScript, take a look at the re-frame-template example!

But to sum up, let’s take an imaginary file.css.

/* file.css */
.test {
  color: red;

  &:hover {
    color: blue;
  }
}

When compiled by modular-styles, a ClojureScript file (like src/re_frame_template/styles/file.cljs) will be emitted.

(ns re-frame-template.styles.file)

(def test "__test_xed87")

And a final file will be generated (public/styles.css).

.__test_xed87 {
  color: red;
}
.__test_xed87:hover {
  color: blue;
}

You can then just import the styles.css stylesheet in your code and use the interfaces in your ClojureScript code:

(ns example
  (:require [re-frame-template.styles.file :as styles]))

(defn component []
  [:div {:class styles/test} "The class is correctly linked!"])

You’re done and can profit of PostCSS and CSS Modules!

Contributing?

All contributions are welcome! Please submit a PR or open an issue!