Tutorial

CSS Grid Layout: The Fr Unit

Updated on April 4, 2022
author

Alligator.io

CSS Grid Layout: The Fr Unit

Introduction

With CSS Grid Layout, we get a new flexible unit: the Fr unit. Fr is a fractional unit and 1fr is for 1 part of the available space. The following are a few examples of the fr unit at work. The grid items in these examples are placed onto the grid with grid areas.

.container {
  display: grid;

  grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr 1fr;
  grid-template-rows: 100px 200px 100px;

  grid-template-areas:
        "head head2 . side"
        "main main2 . side"
        "footer footer footer footer";
}

The 4 columns each take up the same amount of space.

Head
Head 2
Main
Main 2
Side
Footer

Examples using fr

Here’s the same example from above with different fr values. Notice the change in the layout:

.container {
  /* ... */

  grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 40px 20%;
  grid-template-rows: 100px 200px 100px;

  /* ... */
}
Head
Head 2
Main
Main 2
Side
Footer

In the following last example, the sidebar item covers 2fr, so it’ll be the same width as the items that span the 1st and 2nd columns:

.container {
  /* ... */

  grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 40px 2fr;
  grid-template-rows: 100px 200px 100px;

  /* ... */
}
Head
Head 2
Main
Main 2
Side
Footer

Mixed Units

As you saw in the previous examples, you can mix fr values with fixed and percentage values. The fr values will be divided between the space that’s left after what’s taken by the other values.

For example, if you have a grid with 4 columns as in the following snippet, the 1st column will be 300px, the second 80px (10% of 800px), the 3rd and 4th columns will be 210px (each occupying half of the remaining space):

main {
  width: 800px;
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 300px 10% 1fr 1fr;
  /* 300px 80px 210px 210px */

  grid-template-rows: auto;
}

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about our products

About the authors
Default avatar
Alligator.io

author

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
3 Comments


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Without the html, this doesn’t make sense.

Will be nice a detailed explanation of repeat() notation. Thx!

how did you span the last column across the rows and how did you span the footer across all the columns?

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more