Easy way to use Dark Mode in Next.js + Tailwind
Yesterday I was working on my personal website, and I really wanted to add a dark mode toggle. I already converted my site to use Tailwind before, so how do I enable dark mode now?
It’s simple: in Tailwind v2 dark mode is built in (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/dark-mode).
To be able to toggle the dark mode, you should put darkMode: 'class' in your tailwind.config.js.
This configuration implies that a class called dark will be added to the <html> tag.
Once this class is active, your dark:{class} classes will become active.
To link this functionality up with Next.js I used the lightweight next-themes library (https://github.com/pacocoursey/next-themes).
After installing this library, simply change your _app.js to include the ThemeProvider:
import { ThemeProvider } from "next-themes";
function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
return (
<ThemeProvider attribute="class">
<Component {...pageProps} />
</ThemeProvider>
);
}
export default MyApp;
Including the attribute="class" is very important, since this tells the
library to use the Tailwind dark theme class.
For the toggle button I used the following:
import { useTheme } from "next-themes";
const { theme, setTheme } = useTheme();
return (
<button
aria-label="Toggle Dark Mode"
type="button"
className="p-3 h-12 w-12 order-2 md:order-3"
onClick={() => setTheme(theme === "dark" ? "light" : "dark")}
/>
);
An example of the dark:{class} code, this will use a purple background color for light mode and a darkgrey color for dark mode:
return <nav className="fixed bg-purple dark:bg-darkgrey h-16 w-full z-50" />;
And that’s it! The theme is being switched when you click the button. Live example can be found here: https://www.thomasledoux.be/ Github source: https://github.com/thomasledoux1/website-thomas Inspired by: https://leerob.io
