ShadcnUI

Guidelines for using shadcn/ui, a collection of interface components whose source code is copied into and owned by your project.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when adding or customizing UI components, initializing shadcn/ui, composing components, and working with Tailwind CSS or accessibility primitives.
Why use it?
They explain how to customize the components, use their Tailwind CSS styling, preserve accessibility, and manage them with the command-line tool.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/thesethrose/devrules/shadcnui
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheSethRose/DevRules

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 1,768 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.01768
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00884
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00354
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00177

Measured yesterday against content hash 5968acc06855, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ShadcnUI scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/technologies/ShadcnUI.mdc · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

shadcn/ui Best Practices

Core Philosophy

  • Component Ownership / Open Code: Understand that shadcn/ui components are copied into your project (typically components/ui/) via the CLI, not installed as an opaque dependency. You own this code and are encouraged to customize it.
  • Composition: Components are designed to be composable, often built upon lower-level primitives (like Radix UI).
  • Tailwind CSS Based: Styling relies heavily on Tailwind CSS utility classes.
  • Accessibility: Built with accessibility primitives.
  • CLI Driven: Interaction (initialization, adding components, building registries) is primarily done via the shadcn-ui CLI.

CLI Usage

Use a package runner like npx, pnpm dlx, yarn dlx, or bunx.

init

Initializes dependencies and configuration (components.json, cn util, CSS variables) for a project.

Command:

# Example using npx
npx shadcn-ui@latest init [components...]

Usage: shadcn init [options] [components...] Initialize your project and install dependencies.

Arguments:

  • components: Optional. The components to add or a URL to the component upon initialization.

Options:

  • -y, --yes: Skip confirmation prompt. (default: true)
  • -d, --defaults: Use default configuration. (default: false)
  • -f, --force: Force overwrite of existing configuration. (default: false)
  • -c, --cwd <cwd>: The working directory. Defaults to the current directory.
  • -s, --silent: Mute output. (default: false)
  • --src-dir: Use the src directory when creating a new project. (default: false)
  • --no-src-dir: Do not use the src directory when creating a new project.
  • --css-variables: Use CSS variables for theming. (default: true)
  • --no-css-variables: Do not use CSS variables for theming.
  • -h, --help: Display help for command.

add

Adds components and their dependencies to your project.

Command:

# Example using npx
npx shadcn-ui@latest add <component> [component...]

Usage: shadcn add [options] [components...] Add a component to your project.

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 138 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 5968acc06855

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ShadcnUI is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository TheSethRose/DevRules (25 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,768 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.