How to set up CSS Modules with esbuild
I'm JS developer with 13 years of professional experience. I'm always happy to teach my craft.
In this article, I'll show how to configure CSS Modules with esbuild.
CSS Modules
It is a technic of making our styles scoped locally. I first encountered it while working on this SolidJS + esbuild. My understanding is that it's popular among developers using react.
Code
My code is pretty simples. src/style.module.css:
.test {
color: #66f;
}
src/index.js:
import styles from "./style.module.css";
const header = document.createElement("h1");
header.innerHTML = "Hello world";
header.className = styles.test;
document.body.appendChild(header);
Output
This is combined in a way that ensures no css class collision:
<style>
._test_1f4jo_1 {
color: #66f;
}
</style>
...
<h1 class="_test_1f4jo_1">Hello world</h1>
Dependencies
Esbuild needs a plugin to support CSS modules. On the plugin list, there are 2 listed. I used esbuild-css-modules-plugin here. The dependencies needed to run it all successfully:
$ npm install --save-dev esbuild-css-modules-plugin esbuild
An additional dependency is needed to address a tiny dependency issue:
$ npm install --save-dev css-tree
esbuild
For using a plugin with esbuild, we need a build script. build.js:
#!/usr/bin/env node
const cssModulesPlugin = require("esbuild-css-modules-plugin");
require("esbuild")
.build({
logLevel: "info",
entryPoints: ["src/index.js"],
bundle: true,
outfile: "dist/main.js",
plugins: [cssModulesPlugin()],
})
.catch(() => process.exit(1));
If you run chmod +x build.js, you will be able to run it:
$ ./build.js
dist/main.js 722b
⚡ Done in 16ms
Links
Video course
You can check out my course about esbuild.
Summary
In this article, we have seen how to configure CSS Modules with esbuild.





