preact-css-extract

This package provides the following two main features: a vite plugin for compile-time css extraction and a custom preact classList prop integration based on clsx.

This is inspired by EmotionCSS (that is a bit outdated to my understanding and it doesn’t support ViteJS and Preact together) and VueJS class attributes. Also I don’t want to use heavy css-in-js solutions or TailwindCSS (for various reasons).

Overview

This project provides tools for managing component styling at build time while maintaining a clean, developer-friendly API. It includes:

CSS Extract Plugin: A Vite plugin that processes template literal CSS declarations and extracts them into a central stylesheet during compilation. 1.

Preact classList Helper: A Preact “option hook” integration that extends the component props API with a classList attribute that forwards class names to the clsx library for conditional class composition.

Usage Example

CSS Extraction with Template Literals

Define styles using the css template literal in your component files:

export function Alert() {
return (
<div
class={css`
padding: 12px;
background-color: orangered;
color: white;
border-radius: 4px;

&:hover {
background-color: red;
}
`}
>
Warning!
</div>
)
}

As strings are just replaced with their generated class names, you can also define styles in variables for reuse:

import { css } from "preact-css-extract/comptime"

const buttonStyles = css`
padding: 8px 16px;
background-color: royalblue;
color: white;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;

&:hover {
background-color: darkblue;
}
`

export function Button() {
return <button class={buttonStyles}>Click me</button>
}

The plugin processes these CSS declarations at build time, generates a unique class name based on the content hash (like css-1a2b3c), and injects all styles where the @extracted-css directive is placed in your css files.

Example usage in a css file:

@layer base, components, utilities;

@layer base {
body {
margin: 0;
font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
background-color: #f0f0f0;
}
}

@layer components {
@extracted-css;
}

@layer utilities {
.font-bold {
font-weight: bold;
}
}

Which results in a final CSS output similar to:

@layer base, components, utilities;

@layer base {
body {
margin: 0;
font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
background-color: #f0f0f0;
}
}

@layer components {
.css-1a2b3c {
padding: 8px 16px;
background-color: royalblue;
color: white;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;

&:hover {
background-color: darkblue;
}
}
}

@layer utilities {
.font-bold {
font-weight: bold;
}
}

classList Attribute

To enable the Preact clsx integration with the classList attribute, set it up as follows. In your application entry point, add:

import { setupPreactClasslist } from "preact-css-extract"

setupPreactClasslist()

And add a global types.d.ts file to your project with the following content to extend the Preact JSX types:

/// <reference path="../node_modules/preact-css-extract/preact-classlist.d.ts" />

Then use the classList prop with object notation, here is an example:

...
<span
classList={[
css`
margin: 0 2rem;
font-size: 2rem;
`,
counter % 2 === 0 && "font-bold",
]}
>
{counter}
</span>
...

This automatically merges with any existing class prop using clsx for proper class concatenation.

Another useful technique to separate layout and themes or base styles from variants is the following

const buttonStyle = css`
...
`
const buttonPrimaryStyle = css`
...
`
const buttonSecondaryStyle = css`
...
`

...

<button
classList={[
buttonStyle,
someCondition ? buttonPrimaryStyle : buttonSecondaryStyle
]}
>
Ok
</button>

Installation

Install the package using npm, yarn, pnpm, or bun:

npm install preact-css-extract
# or
yarn add preact-css-extract
pnpm add preact-css-extract
bun add preact-css-extract

Plugin Setup

To set up the CSS Extract Plugin in your Vite configuration, add the following to your vite.config.ts or vite.config.js:

import { defineConfig } from "vite"

import { cssExtractPlugin } from "preact-css-extract/plugin"
import preact from "@preact/preset-vite"

export default defineConfig({
plugins: [cssExtractPlugin(), preact()],
})

Caveats

For my needs this is already completely on par with the TailwindCSS “experience” of writing styles near your components, however there are some caveats to be aware of:

For now I’ve kept the generated css very simple, there is no added scoping or style collision prevention. This means that if you have two components that generate the same css, they will share the same class name. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but something to be aware of.

The CSS extraction is currently based on a simple regular expression. This means that the css strings must be known at compile time and cannot be dynamically generated.

I think this is a reasonable compromise as one can use specialized utility classes as in the example above to dynamically add styles, or just update styles directly with the style attribute.

CSS snippets are hashed to 6-character class names, I hope its enough to avoid collisions. File an issue if you find any and we’ll have a laugh at the examples together...

Improvements and Future Work

Set explicitly the class name of a css snippet, something like:

const buttonStyles = css("my-button")`
background-color: blue;
color: white;
...
`

or just extract the first class present in the css snippet:

const buttonStyles = css`
.my-button {
background-color: blue;
color: white;
...
}
`

Better handling for scoped styles

More robust CSS parsing instead of regex-based extraction

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.