Following the Laravel installation guide does not work.

[PollieDev]

Hey all,

I'm stuck on the Laravel installation guide for Tailwind v4.
For me, if I follow the guide step by step I run into a Vite error.

[plugin:@tailwindcss/vite:generate:serve] Can't resolve 'tailwindcss' in '/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/resources/css'
/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/resources/css/app.css
    at finishWithoutResolve (/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:564:18)
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:656:15
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:718:5
    at eval (eval at create (/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/tapable/lib/HookCodeFactory.js:33:10), <anonymous>:15:1)
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:718:5
    at eval (eval at create (/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/tapable/lib/HookCodeFactory.js:33:10), <anonymous>:27:1)
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/DescriptionFilePlugin.js:89:43
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:718:5
    at eval (eval at create (/Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/tapable/lib/HookCodeFactory.js:33:10), <anonymous>:15:1)
    at /Users/my-name/Projects/my-project/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/Resolver.js:718:5

I confirmed this is the case on a new project. As mentioned I followed the guide step by step even with the same project name (as you might see in the error above). Only difference is that I changed the welcome.blade.php instead of app.blade.php on the last step as Laravel by default uses welcome.blade.php.

This guide is very close to the normal installation, only difference is that normal Vite guide doesn't include @source (but already tried without, same error) and that the way it imports the file is not via the @vite laravel helper. Which I would assume is not the cause either.

Neither can I find other people complaining about this error, so I'm quite lost. Am I missing something important? Or does the general installation guide / Laravel installation guide not work?

Any help or guidance would be more than welcome.
Thanks in advance.

[PollieDev]

I am dumb, should have checked this before.
For some reason doing npm install tailwindcss @tailwindcss/vite installed TailwindCSS v3 still. So I was doing the v4 setup with v3 codebase. Resolved when manually setting tailwind version to v4 😅

[eusanhdyas]

I am dumb, should have checked this before. For some reason doing npm install tailwindcss @tailwindcss/vite installed TailwindCSS v3 still. So I was doing the v4 setup with v3 codebase. Resolved when manually setting tailwind version to v4 😅
How did you do that? I'm struggling with something similar...

[PollieDev]

In your package.json file, set the version of tailwindcss to ^4.0.0 and run npm install

[Chukwusombiri]

Thanks for thinking outside the box, i made the observer too but didn't think of changing the version to 4.0.0 cause i just assumed since the tailwindcss/vite plugin is set to version 4.0.3, its how it set up for laravel installation. And since i followed the installation guide on tailwindcss website, i couldn't have thought that could've been the problem. Once again, thanks for your solution.

[BouchantoufZakaria]

This was the solution for my case , thank you so much ❤️