Set flexbox children to have different heights to use up available space

Question

Using a two-column flexbox layout, how can different-sized children be made to fill all available space, instead of all children having the height of the tallest child of the row?

I set up a demo on jsbin that illustrates the problem. I'd like for all the children to be the size of their wrapped contents.

#container {

 width: 800px;
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
}

.cell {
  width: 300px;
  flex; 1 auto;
}


<div id="container">

<div class="cell">
Cells with arbitrarily long content.</div>

<div class="cell">
</div>

<div class="cell">
</div>

<div class="cell">
</div>

<div class="cell">
</div>

</div>

</body>
</html>

Answer 1

This is how Flexbox rows are expected to behave. Flexbox is not meant to recreate Masonry with pure CSS: items in one row cannot occupy space allocated for a preceding/following row (same goes for columns if you're using column orientation). You can use align-items to prevent them from stretching, but that's about it:

http://cssdeck.com/labs/9s9rhrhl

#container {   width: 800px;   display: flex;   flex-wrap: wrap;   align-items: flex-start; }  .cell {   width: 300px;   flex: 1 auto;   padding: 10px;   border: 1px solid red; } 

Otherwise, you should be using the column orientation or the multi-column module (see this SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20862961/1652962)