How to make a flex item not fill the height of the flex container?

Question

As you can see in the code below, the left div inside the flex container stretches to meet the height of the right div. Is there an attribute I can set to make its height the minimum required for holding its content (like usual height: auto divs outside flex containers)?

#a {
  display: flex;
}
#a > div {
  background-color: red;
  padding: 5px;
  margin: 2px;
}
#b {
  height: auto;
}

<div id="a">
  <div id="b">left</div>
  <div>right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br></div>
</div>

Answer 1

The align-items, or respectively align-content attribute controls this behaviour.

align-items defines the items' positioning perpendicularly to flex-direction.

The default flex-direction is row, therfore vertical placement can be controlled with align-items.

There is also the align-self attribute to control the alignment on a per item basis.

#a {
  display:flex;

  align-items:flex-start;
  align-content:flex-start;
  }

#a > div {
  
  background-color:red;
  padding:5px;
  margin:2px;
  }
 #a > #c {
  align-self:stretch;
 }

<div id="a">
  
  <div id="b">left</div>
  <div id="c">middle</div>
  <div>right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br></div>
  
</div>

css-tricks has an excellent article on the topic. I recommend reading it a couple of times.

Answer 2

When you create a flex container various default flex rules come into play.

Two of these default rules are flex-direction: row and align-items: stretch. This means that flex items will automatically align in a single row, and each item will fill the height of the container.

If you don't want flex items to stretch – i.e., like you wrote:

make its height the minimum required for holding its content

... then simply override the default with align-items: flex-start.

#a {
  display: flex;
  align-items: flex-start; /* NEW */
}
#a > div {
  background-color: red;
  padding: 5px;
  margin: 2px;
}
#b {
  height: auto;
}

<div id="a">
  <div id="b">left</div>
  <div>
    right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br>right<br>
  </div>
</div>

Here's an illustration from the flexbox spec that highlights the five values for align-items and how they position flex items within the container. As mentioned before, stretch is the default value.

^{Source: W3C}