Somehow centering a div still seems to trouble people. I have mostly been working with Tailwind CSS lately and I wanted to quickly share how I center a div with Tailwind. I’ll first show the examples and then describe what is happening.

<div class="flex flex-row min-h-screen justify-center items-center">
  I am centered
</div>

The same classes work with either flex-row or flex-col, which set the flexbox’s main axis either horizontally or vertically, respectively. Setting the height with min-h-screen is just an easy way to take up an entire screen’s view. The final two classes are where I needed to learn a tiny amount of CSS.

I played around with justification and alignment far too long before I finally looked into what they affect. justify-content refers to how the content should be positioned along the main axis, while align-content refers to how the content should be positioned along the cross axis. Justifying content and aligning content with Tailwind are simple one-to-one mappings between their classes and the actual CSS, so once I understood how the CSS worked, I understood how the utility worked.