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Comment by acaloiar | Hacker News Reader

> Standalone CLI — we haven’t worked on a standalone CLI for the new engine yet, but will absolutely have it before the v4.0 release.

This part is the most exciting to me. Given the rest of the release announcement, I'm assuming this means that it'll be built in Rust rather than embed Node. While I'm not a Rust zealot of anything, I'm very partial to not embedding Node. Particularly when it depends on using Vercel's now-abandoned pkg[1] tool.

[1] https://github.com/vercel/pkg

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It'll likely embed Node I'm afraid — the vast majority of Tailwind is written in JS so we'd have to rewrite all of that in Rust just for the standalone CLI, and migrating the entire project to Rust is impractical because we'd have no JS plugin story like we do now.

Bummer, but thanks for resetting my expectations :)

I'm feeling a similar disappointment here, although I'm sure this was carefully considered by the Tailwind team.

I've been working with a fully Rust-based web stack, and it's been such a joy. Tailwind compilation causes me to still deal with Node. I'd love to see that go away.

The current standalone tailwind CLI does not support external plugins like DaisyUI. It would be great if external plugins could be supported in the next CLI version, it will reduce the need to use npm for some projects.

Don't you need to use npm to install DaisyUI though? If you have to install third party plugins using node already to me the solution is to use our actual node CLI instead of the standalone one.

The way I was thinking this would work is that the standalone CLI could be configured to pick up plugins from a specified location. That way as long as the plugins are setup locally in the required format, the standalone CLI would be able to load them. The setup process need not require npm.

There is a sibling comment which mentioned a project which is trying to bundle DaisyUI specifically with the standalone CLI. That would solve my use case but will not be a generic solution for other plugins.

This is handy for that specific need: https://github.com/dobicinaitis/tailwind-cli-extra

But I strongly agree.

Thanks, that looks like what I was looking for, did not find that when I looked few months back. I tried it now and had some issues with SIP check on macOS, started a discussion in the repo.

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