---
title: 'Introducing Tailwind Nexjs Starter Blog'
date: '2021-01-12'
lastmod: '2021-05-08'
tags: ['next-js', 'tailwind', 'guide']
draft: false
summary: 'Looking for a performant, out of the box template, with all the best in web technology to support your blogging needs? Checkout the Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog template.'
images: ['/static/images/canada/mountains.jpg', '/static/images/canada/toronto.jpg']
---

![tailwind-nextjs-banner](/static/images/twitter-card.png)

# Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog

[![Deploy with Vercel](https://vercel.com/button)](https://vercel.com/new/git/external?repository-url=https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog)

This is a [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/), [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) blogging starter template. Comes out of the box configured with the latest technologies to make technical writing a breeze. Easily configurable and customizable. Perfect as a replacement to existing Jekyll and Hugo individual blogs.

## Examples

- [Demo Blog](https://tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog.vercel.app/) - this repo
- [My personal blog](https://www.timlrx.com) - modified to auto-generate blog posts with dates

Using the template? Happy to accept any PR with modifications made e.g. sub-paths, localization or multiple authors

## Motivation

I wanted to port my existing blog to Nextjs and Tailwind CSS but there was no easy out of the box template to use so I decided to create one.

It is inspired by [Lee Robinson's blog](https://github.com/leerob/leerob.io), but focuses only on static site generation. Design is adapted from [Tailwindlabs blog](https://github.com/tailwindlabs/blog.tailwindcss.com).

I wanted it to be nearly as feature-rich as popular blogging templates like [beautiful-jekyll](https://github.com/daattali/beautiful-jekyll) and [Hugo Academic](https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-modules) but with the best of React's ecosystem and current web development's best practices.

## Features

- Easy styling customization with [Tailwind 2.0](https://blog.tailwindcss.com/tailwindcss-v2)
- Near perfect lighthouse score - [Lighthouse report](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210111_DiC1_08f3670c3430bf4a9b76fc3b927716c5/)
- Lightweight, 43kB first load JS, uses Preact in production build
- Mobile-friendly view
- Light and dark theme
- [MDX - write JSX in markdown documents!](https://mdxjs.com/)
- Server-side syntax highlighting with [rehype-prism](https://github.com/mapbox/rehype-prism)
- Math display supported via [KaTeX](https://katex.org/)
- Automatic image optimization via [next/image](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/image-optimization)
- Flexible data retrieval with [next-mdx-remote](https://github.com/hashicorp/next-mdx-remote)
- Support for tags - each unique tag will be its own page
- Support for nested routing of blog posts
- SEO friendly with RSS feed, sitemaps and more!

## Sample posts

- [A markdown guide](/blog/github-markdown-guide)
- [Learn more about images in Next.js](/blog/guide-to-using-images-in-nextjs)
- [A tour of math typesetting](/blog/deriving-ols-estimator)
- [Simple MDX image grid](/blog/pictures-of-canada)
- [Example of long prose](/blog/the-time-machine)
- [Example of Nested Route Post](/blog/nested-route/introducing-multi-part-posts-with-nested-routing)

## Quick Start Guide

1. `npx degit https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog.git`
2. Personalize `siteMetadata.json`
3. Modify `projectsData.js`
4. Modify `headerNavLinks.js` to customize navigation links
5. Add blog posts
6. Deploy on Vercel

## Development

First, run the development server:

```bash
npm start
# or
npm run dev
```

Open [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000) with your browser to see the result.

You can start editing the page by modifying `pages/index.js`. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.

## Extend / Customize

`data/siteMetadata.json` - contains most of the site related information which should be modified for a user's need.

`data/projectsData.js` - data used to generate styled card in projects page.

`data/headerNavLinks.js` - navigation links.

`data/logo.svg` - replace with your own logo.

`data/blog` - replace with your own blog posts.

`public/static` - store assets such as images and favicons.

`css/tailwind.css` - contains the tailwind stylesheet which can be modified to change the overall look and feel of the site.

`components/social-icons` - to add other icons, simply copy an svg file from [Simple Icons](https://simpleicons.org/) and map them in `index.js`. Other icons uses [heroicons](https://heroicons.com/).

`components/MDXComponents.js` - pass your own JSX code or React component by specifying it over here. You can then call them directly in the `.mdx` or `.md` file. By default, a custom link and image component is passed.

`layouts` - main templates used in pages.

`pages` - pages to route to. Read the [Next.js documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs) for more information

## Post

### Frontmatter

Frontmatter follows [Hugo's standards](https://gohugo.io/content-management/front-matter/).

Currently 7 fields are supported.

```
title (required)
date (required)
tags (required, can be empty array)
lastmod (optional)
draft (optional)
summary (optional)
images (optional, if none provided defaults to socialBanner in siteMetadata config)
```

Here's an example of a post's frontmatter:

```
---
title: 'Introducing Tailwind Nexjs Starter Blog'
date: '2021-01-12'
lastmod: '2021-01-18'
tags: ['next-js', 'tailwind', 'guide']
draft: false
summary: 'Looking for a performant, out of the box template, with all the best in web technology to support your blogging needs? Checkout the Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog template.'
images: ['/static/images/canada/mountains.jpg', '/static/images/canada/toronto.jpg']
---
```

### Compose

Run `node ./scripts/compose.js` to bootstrap a new post.

Follow the interactive prompt to generate a post with pre-filled front matter.

## Deploy

**Vercel**  
The easiest way to deploy the template is to use the [Vercel Platform](https://vercel.com) from the creators of Next.js. Check out the [Next.js deployment documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs/deployment) for more details.

**Netlify / Github Pages / Firebase etc.**  
As the template uses `next/image` for image optimization, additional configurations has to be made to deploy on other popular static hosting websites like [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) or [Github Pages](https://pages.github.com/). An alternative image optimization provider such as Imgix, Cloudinary or Akamai has to be used. Alternatively, replace the `next/image` component with a standard `<img>` tag. See [`next/image` documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/image-optimization) for more details.
