Tailwind CSS Academy · Lesson

Adding Custom Utilities via Plugin

Write a plugin that adds new utility classes like text-shadow-* or scrollbar-hide not present in the default Tailwind distribution.

When to Add a Custom Utility

Add a custom utility when you find yourself repeatedly writing the same raw CSS in @apply blocks or inline styles, when Tailwind lacks a utility for a valid CSS property, or when a browser-specific prefix combination needs a clean class name. Good custom utilities follow Tailwind's single-responsibility principle: one utility controls one CSS property or a tightly related group. Avoid creating utilities that set many unrelated properties — those belong in components.

Scrollbar Hide Utility

One of the most commonly requested custom utilities is .scrollbar-hide — it hides the scrollbar visually while keeping the element scrollable. This requires vendor-specific properties across browsers: scrollbar-width: none for Firefox and -webkit-scrollbar: display none for Chromium browsers. Packaging this in a plugin makes it available as a simple scrollbar-hide class anywhere in your markup.

const plugin = require('tailwindcss/plugin');

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    plugin(function({ addUtilities }) {
      addUtilities({
        '.scrollbar-hide': {
          '-ms-overflow-style': 'none',
          'scrollbar-width': 'none',
          '&::-webkit-scrollbar': {
            display: 'none'
          }
        },
        '.scrollbar-default': {
          '-ms-overflow-style': 'auto',
          'scrollbar-width': 'auto',
          '&::-webkit-scrollbar': {
            display: 'block'
          }
        }
      });
    })
  ]
};

// Usage
// <div class='overflow-x-auto scrollbar-hide'>...

All lessons in this course

← Back to Tailwind CSS Academy