Non-existence of .git directory breaks tailwind styles

[danielsomerfield]

What version of Tailwind CSS are you using?

v4.0.12

What build tool (or framework if it abstracts the build tool) are you using?

For example: postcss-cli 11.0.0, Next.js 15.1.7, Vite 6.1.0

Vite 6.2.1

What version of Node.js are you using?

v22.14.0

What browser are you using?

chrome

What operating system are you using?

macos

Reproduction URL

• Following the instructions here
• When prompted whether to init a git project, choose "No".
• Run the project with npm dev
• Navigate to the URL and notice that the text is not centered
• Go to your project root and run mkdir .git
• Kill the npm process and run npm dev again
• Navigate to the URL and notice that the text now is centered

Describe your issue

It appears that the existence or non-existence of the .git directory effects the behaviour of the app. If you simply create an empty .git directory, all works. The existence or non existence of .gitignore appears to have no effect.

[philipp-spiess]

Hey! One thing that I can think of if you do not have a .git folder, is that our .gitignore heuristics will walk up your file system and try to find any .gitignore file in parents. Can you take a look if your parent folders have any .gitignore that might interfere? You should be able to run a bash script like this:

current="$PWD"
while [ "$current" != "/" ]; do
  if [ -f "$current/.gitignore" ]; then
    echo "$current/.gitignore"
  fi
  current=$(dirname "$current")
done

[philipp-spiess]

I've been trying out the reproduction and it works regardless of the .git folder being present on my machine.

[DrLightman]

On the contrary my .gitignore seems to be ignored, and whenever I commit something Tailwindcss cli echoes ~10 lines of "Done in ms"

All I can think of that gets modified during a commit is something inside /.git, a directory that should be ignored I presume.

Also directories in .gitignore are still monitored by the tailwindcss cli and not ignored, if I delete a file from an ignored root dir, eg: /.work/ the tailwindcss cli still echoes ~10 lines of "Done in ms"

Not 100% related to the op but it's just to let you know maybe something needs to be looked into regarding .git and .gitignore.

[philipp-spiess]

@DrLightman Hey! Mind create a new GitHub issue for this with a reproduction? We don't add any git hooks or interfere with the .git folder in any way (we just use the information of the .gitignore file to know which files we can avoid scanning (i.e your node_modules/ folder).

[philipp-spiess]

@danielsomerfield Hey! Did you have the chance to look into weather a parent .gitignore interferes with the setup? :)

[danielsomerfield]

I think you're on to something. My project is a combined UI and backend project and so the directory structure is:

/
   .gitignore
   ui/
      package.json
      app/
   service/

I just tried it in a clean directory and all was fine. Then I tried it in a directory that had a .gitignore directory above it and it repro'ed. So, yes, it looks like it only occurs if there is a .gitignore in a parent directory.

[philipp-spiess]

@danielsomerfield What's the content of the .gitignore file for when this issue occurs?

[danielsomerfield]

It looks like virtualenv created a file at some point way upstream that had *. Delete that file and it seems ok.

[philipp-spiess]

@danielsomerfield Yeah that makes sense. Unfortunately with no .git folder we can't really find your repository-root so this behavior is kind-of expected (although I agree that it's not super clear). Don't think we can fix this easily though, do you got any ideas? 🤔
Going to close this issue for now though, but we can keep collecting ideas here etc.

[MarkusDNC]

I had a monorepo with this issue, and one solution that seemed to have worked for me before downgrading Tailwind was to create a symlink to the parent .git in my frontend folder.

[danielsomerfield]

@philipp-spiess - good question. I'm not sure. I'm a tailwind newbie, so my thinking about this isn't very nuanced. I guess the only thing I would say that having an unbounded upward traversal seems risky. Tailwind is opinionated, and that's fine, but the fact that it's behaviour reaches outside the boundaries of a "project" and into a much larger environment seems like it's a recipe for difficult-to-understand behaviour. Is there some way to limit that repository root search and if nothing is found, message that somehow?

Maybe there are two things:

• Support nested projects / monorepos by allowing the ability to be explicit about the repository root
• If some kind of hard limit on the upward traversal is impossible, is there a way to warn users that their environment looks like it could be challenging because of some expectation that is being violated. e.g. the place you are finding the git repo looks out-of-the-ordinary. I'm not sure how you would do that, exactly, but perhaps there is some file that you would expect to co-exist with the .git or .gitignore.

Anyway, not sure that's useful or if this is a common enough case to even worry about. I just know that after a few hours I kind of gave up.