How to Prevent Flex Items from Unwanted Stretching in a Flex Container?

How to Prevent Flex Items from Unwanted Stretching

When nesting elements within a flex container, it's common to encounter situations where child elements stretch to fill the entire container height, even if they only contain minimal content. This can be undesirable, especially if you want to control the size of specific flex items.

Understanding the Issue

By default, flex items stretch to occupy the full height of their container. This occurs because the align-items property is set to stretch. This means that the container will distribute the available space equally among its child elements, causing them to stretch vertically.

Preventing Flex Items from Stretching

To prevent specific flex items from stretching, you can adjust the align-items property. Here are two approaches to achieve this:

1. Apply align-items: flex-start to the Flex Container

By setting align-items: flex-start on the flex container, you instruct the browser to align the items at the top of the container. This means that they will no longer stretch to fill the entire height.

div {
  align-items: flex-start;
  background: tan;
  display: flex;
  height: 200px;
}
span {
  background: red;
}

2. Use flex-shrink: 0 on the Specific Flex Item

If you want to prevent specific flex items from stretching while allowing others to fill the remaining space, you can use the flex-shrink property. By setting flex-shrink: 0 on the desired items, you prevent them from shrinking (and stretching) beyond their original size.

div {
  background: tan;
  display: flex;
  height: 200px;
}

span {
  background: red;
  flex-shrink: 0;
}

The above is the detailed content of How to Prevent Flex Items from Unwanted Stretching in a Flex Container?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!