I don’t care how you do it, just make getting your dependencies deterministic based on files committed to your repo!

Happily the Tailwind hex package encourages you configure a fixed version number, so you’ll never get surprise breakage as long as you’re committing your mix.lock file as well.

I’m only suggesting package.json/package-lock.json because their projects are already using the npm ecosystem to fetch the tailwind dependency. A Makefile that does `curl $TAILWIND_GITHUB_RELEASE_URL -o ./departing/tailwind` is fine too (this is what Tailwind.hex is doing under the hood).

AFAIK using the tailwindcss-cli without npm makes it impossible to use Tailwind plugins, such as DaisyUI.

This is not true, here is a demo projects which uses the Hex Tailwind and DaisyUI: https://github.com/naymspace/backpex/tree/develop/demo

Doesn't this still require NPM to install daisyui?

I believe that is true, although there is a project which bundles Tailwinds and DaisyUI into a single standalone executable:

https://github.com/dobicinaitis/tailwind-cli-extra

I have not tried this out yet, personally.

I just tried it... failed to load with very strange errors about postcss and unknown words.

FWIW, the tailwind binary from the official channel works great. I install it in my build.rs.