Full-screen background video with Tailwind CSS [2022]

Call me old-school, but I love to see video headers. I hardly use them on my personal website, but I love to implement a video header for clients with stunning videos.

I want to teach you how to implement a full-screen background video in this tutorial. We will only use the classes of Tailwind CSS.

The result is this stunning full-screen video header using only Tailwind CSS:

Tailwind CSS full-screen video background

To create this background, we are leveraging yesterday's Tailwind parallax header. It has a very similar setup, only now we don't make it parallax scroll.

The basic HTML structure will look like this:

<header>
  <div>Welcome to my site!</div>
  <video autoplay loop muted>
    <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    Your browser does not support the video tag.
  </video>
</header>

You can see we used an HTML header tag. There, we have a div that will hold a block that will sit on top of the video. Then we have a video tag, which can hold a video or multiple sources.

I will now write down the end HTML structure and then go through the importance of each class.

<header
  class="relative flex items-center justify-center h-screen mb-12 overflow-hidden"
>
  <div
    class="relative z-30 p-5 text-2xl text-white bg-purple-300 bg-opacity-50 rounded-xl"
  >
    Welcome to my site!
  </div>
  <video
    autoplay
    loop
    muted
    class="absolute z-10 w-auto min-w-full min-h-full max-w-none"
  >
    <source
      src="https://assets.mixkit.co/videos/preview/mixkit-set-of-plateaus-seen-from-the-heights-in-a-sunset-26070-large.mp4"
      type="video/mp4"
    />
    Your browser does not support the video tag.
  </video>
</header>

The classes used for the video background:

relative: Makes the header element relative. We will make the video absolute to position it.
flex: Adds a display flex so we can align the text block inside
items-center: Aligns the text-block vertically
justify-center: Aligns the text-block horizontally
h-screen: The h-screen adds a 100vh height, so the video is scaled to 100% of the viewport height.
mb-12: We add quite a big margin-bottom with this (3rem)
overflow-hidden: The video will be slightly bigger than our header, so we don't want to show the overflow.

Then for our overlay text block, we use the following classes:

relative: We need to make this relative to place it on top of the video
z-30: This needs to be higher than the z-index on the video
p-5: Adds equal padding on each side (1.25rem)
text-2xl: Makes the text nice and big (1.5rem)
text-white: Make the text white
bg-purple-300: A nice cool purple color
bg-opacity-50: This ensures the background has an opacity of 50%.
rounded-xl: Adds the nice rounder borders

And last but not least, we can add the classes for our video element:

absolute: The video is an absolute positioned element
z-10: We give the video a lower z-index than our text-block to keep it in the background
w-auto: The width can be auto so that it will adjust
min-w-full: We need to make the min-width 100%
min-h-full: The same goes for the min-height
max-w-none: Unset the default max-width

With this, we have all our classes in place. This will give us a nice full-screen video header using only Tailwind CSS classes.