twpalette

A CLI tool that generates a complete Tailwind CSS color palette from any single color input.

Give it a color in any format — hex, OKLCH, HSL, RGB — and it outputs a full 50–950 palette as CSS custom properties, matched to the closest Tailwind v4 color family and scaled to your input color's hue and chroma.

Usage

npx twpalette <color>

Examples:

npx twpalette "#3b82f6"
npx twpalette "oklch(0.637 0.237 25.33)"
npx twpalette "hsl(220 90% 56%)"
npx twpalette "rgb(59 130 246)"

The output shows a colored swatch grid followed by CSS custom properties ready to paste into your stylesheet. The /* main shade */ comment marks the shade that maps closest to your input color's lightness.

How it works

1. Family matching — finds the closest Tailwind color family using deltaE color distance in OKLCH space
2. Shade matching — identifies which shade (50–950) best matches your input color's lightness
3. Palette scaling — applies your input color's hue offset and chroma ratio to the entire family template
4. Naming — looks up the nearest named color from a curated list

Install

npm install -g twpalette

Or run directly without installing:

npx twpalette <color>

Requirements

• Node.js >= 22

Development

Source lives in src/ as TypeScript and runs directly on Node.js >= 23.6 via native type stripping — no build step needed for local use:

./src/cli.ts "#3b82f6"

The npm tarball ships pre-compiled JavaScript from dist/, so installed consumers don't need a TypeScript-capable Node. To publish:

npm run build
npm publish

Credits

• chroma-js — does the heavy lifting: color parsing across every input format, OKLCH conversions, and deltaE distance calculations. BSD-licensed.
• Tailwind color families — the base OKLCH values for each shade (50–950) in src/families.json are derived from the Tailwind CSS v4 default palette: tailwindlabs/tailwindcss · packages/tailwindcss/src/compat/colors.ts. Tailwind CSS is MIT-licensed.
• Color names — the named-color lookup in src/names.json is filtered down from the "short" list published by meodai/color-names at unpkg.com/color-name-list/dist/colornames.short.json (kept only single-word names, deduplicated). color-names is MIT-licensed.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.