No Tailwind binary for FreeBSD

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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1

Hello,

I’m trying to build a basic Phoenix web-app, and I’d like to use Tailwind.

However, when I launch mix phx.server, I get an error:

** (RuntimeError) The tailwind binary couldn’t be found at: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/releases/download/v4.1.12/tailwindcss-freebsd-x64

sure enough, the Tailwind Releases Page has no release for FreeBSD-x64.

How can I solve this? Is there a way to get a working Tailwind binary (building it from source maybe?) and tell Phoenix to use that instead?

2

IMO the best path would be to kick out tailwind and just ship with modern CSS with AI today there is no excuses left for having to pull in a framework that is not portable. Not sure if tailwind’s goal is even to be portable everywhere.

3

The tailwind standalone CLI is built with Bun, and it doesn’t look like they support FreeBSD at this time.

If you want to use Tailwind you should be able to install Node and use it the “normal way”. I would guess the PostCSS path would be the easiest?

I’m a little shocked at how fragmented their installation instructions have become. Stuff like this is why I have sworn off JS dependencies entirely.

4

Out of the frying pan and into the volcano lol

6 Likes
5

Yeah, and it could be excellent promo for tidewave too.

1 Like
6

UnoCSS can be a drop-in replacement for Tailwind 4/3 and should work on FreeBSD if you install Node.js. They have a CLI:

7

Nevermind, just realised the original Tailwind CLI has a Node.js-powered version too.

sudo pkg install -y node npm
8

Ugh, I stumbled upon the same problem and knowing how much I dislike Tailwind, I might just remove it, like @Schultzer said, and continue clean.

9

Thanks for the replies :slight_smile:

I did actually try just making a project without Tailwind, but for my specific use case, having Tailwind does make things easier - basically I’m trying to build a simple todo app that has a sync-engine, so that I can turn off the server, make some changes on one or more of the clients, boot up the server again, and have everything sync. When I make a Phoenix + LiveView without Tailwind, the “new” and “edit” functions are seperate pages, while with Tailwind (which works on Linux), they are all on the same page.

Still, I think in the future just spending a bit of time tweaking the LiveView templates to be what I want may prove a better option than yet another big dependency.

Nevertheless, I tried using Node.js to get Tailwind working:

First I did npm install tailwindcss @tailwindcss/cli, then updated config/config.exs and config/dev.exs to use the new NPM binary.
And then I ran into a bug where daisyui doesn’t really work with Tailwind v4…

I think just modifying the templates to make the New and Edit functions all on one page will be easier in the long run than wading through this dependency quagmire.

Thanks everyone ^^

10

You could’ve gone for the third version of the CLI, which is meant for Tailwind 3:

npm install -D tailwindcss@3

From the Tailwind 3 docs: Installation - Tailwind CSS

11

This just became a problem again for me, too. I was already relying on an unofficial build maintained by a kind individual:

# mix tailwind.install https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/pub/tailwind/v3.2.4/tailwindcss-freebsd-x64

Then, after upgrading to FreeBSD-15.0 I get an error when running this binary:

ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libutil.so.9" not found, required by "inet_gethost"

The failure mode is particularly bad, with infinite restarts silently using 100% CPU.

FreeBSD includes a package for tailwindcss3 (v3.4.17) but and the Elixir glue library can be configured to use a system or custom build:

# which tailwind
/usr/local/bin/tailwind

config :tailwind,
  version: "3.4.17",
  path: "/usr/local/bin/tailwind",
  ...

I run into some trouble with a missing dependency however, I’ll report here once I understand why this is happening:

# mix assets.deploy

Rebuilding...
Error: Cannot find module 'tailwindcss/plugin'
12

The situation is awful. The FreeBSD package expects an environment variable to the Node installation directory. It’s not documented at all. I had to look into the code to find out, it just errored out.

These problems motivate me to get rid of Tailwind altogether.

13

Okay, in my case the missing piece was a small back-compatibility package which allows fbsd 15 to run with older dynamically-linked binaries:

pkg install misc/compat14x

If anyone else needs the standalone binary for fbsd, the instructions in the Tailwind readme are still correct:

mix tailwind.install https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/pub/tailwind/v3.4.17/tailwindcss-freebsd-x64

Works well! Although I usually develop on linux and only run freebsd for production, I also use “mix release” which needs to be run in a production-line environment and it makes sense that tailwind assets.deploy would be included in that pipeline. I’ll propose small changes to the glue library to help others running into this.