CSS Flexbox most easy center vertical and horizontal

— 3 minute read

Ever needed to just center an element completely? Before flex this was almost impossible and we had some crazy hacks for this... Nowadays flex makes it only 3 lines of CSS

.container {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
}

Demo:

See the Pen CSS Flex most easy center vertical and horizontal by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Simple as that! Of course this is a very basic, but yet so powerful option to center elements.

Note: I also wrote a article on how to center using CSS Grid.

CSS Flexbox horizontal center

To center vertical we use the justify-content: center; option.

.container {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
}

See the Pen CSS Flex most easy center vertical by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

CSS Flexbox vertical center

For the horizontal center we can use align-items: center; option.

.container {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

CSS Flexbox center multiple items

Ofcourse we can do this with multiple items.

When using multiple items we can use flex-direction: column; or flex-direction: row; to define which way the elements should flow.

.container {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row; // horizontal main axis
  flex-direction: column; // vertical main axis
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
}

See this example to see the difference: (scroll down)

See the Pen CSS Flex direction by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

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