Some styles missing when previewing or publishing project

[hobbes7878]

For anyone coming here, there appear to be some edge cases where a plugin we use to strip out unused style rules gets a bit greedy and can strip out some rules used in your custom svelte components. This likely only applies to styles applied through our utility class names, for example:

<p class="uppercase">lorem ipsum<p>

To get around this issue, you have a few different options:

1. Use SCSS mixins instead of class names in the component whose styles are being stripped out.

<p>lorem ipsum</p>

<style lang="scss">
  @use '@reuters-graphics/graphics-components/dist/scss/mixins' as mixins;

  p {
    @include mixins.uppercase;
  }
</style>

2. You can disable the plugin entirely by commenting out this line in vite.config.ts at the root of your project. Like this:

plugins: [
    sveltekit(),
    dsv(),
    svelteKitPagesPlugin(),
    // purgeCss(),
],

3. Disabling the plugin will lead to slightly bloated stylesheets for your project. Alternatively, you can also use the plugin's safelisting config options to safe guard specific style rules individually. Like this:

plugins: [
    sveltekit(),
    dsv(),
    svelteKitPagesPlugin(),
    purgeCss({
      safelist: {
        standard: [ 'uppercase' ], // A specific class name
        greedy: [
          /^text-/, // Regular expressions can be used here to capture several classes
        ],
      },
    }),
],

📌 If you have this issue please add a comment here with a link to your project's repo. We're looking for more examples to help nail down why this sometimes happens...

[hobbes7878]

Repro TK, but @deaxmachina found that purgeCSS was stripping classes used in child components.

After closer inspection of our current plugin, it looks like this line is critical. I noticed the rollup docs say that isIncluded can be "null if external or not yet available". If I check that isExternal is not false within the same statement, the class passes through OK to the final stylesheet.

// if (info?.isIncluded !== true || info.code === null) continue;
if ((info?.isIncluded !== true && info?.isExternal !== false) || info.code === null) continue;

[hobbes7878]

OK, after more digging, noticed the child component in question is fenced in by a (pretty normal) if condition that's only true after an element is measured in the browser. Basically:

<script>
  import Child from './Child.svelte';

  let containerWidth;
</script>

<div bind:clientWidth="{containerWidth}">
  {#if containerWidth}
    <Child />
  {/if}
</div>

That's apparently enough for vite/rollup to mark the module as not included in the graph (but also not external) at the point where we generate the bundle, thus not including its class names in the safelist.

If I give containerWidth an initial value (which we often don't do for perfectly reasonable layout shift reasons...), the module is marked included and styles are safeguarded.

That seems like enough of a general case to try to spin up a repro and ask the author if we can come up with a better condition to exclude modules.

That said, after playing with it, the only condition I could come up with to isolate this specific scenario was to specifically allow .svelte files not within node_modules to pass the condition... I'm sure that's not always good practice, though.

[hobbes7878]

Hmm... I was unable to reproduce this on a fresh sveltekit install in: https://github.com/reuters-graphics/purgecss-repro

... with similar page/component structure and child nested under conditional statement that is only true in the browser. Unsure how this is an edge case at this point.

Will leave this open to collect any other examples and with the instructions for the nuclear option to shut the plugin down.

[pkd2512]

Came up with a CLI utility to scan and suggest safelist options that can be directly plugged into the vite.config.ts
See: https://github.com/reuters-graphics/newsapps-football-worldcup-2026/issues/13

Can add this util in the Graphics Bin and run on build. We can also extend the util to check if there are any styles globally that override defaults, like accidentally defining a global h3 to be centre-aligned that also breaks footer and stuff.