I’ve been trying some different options for Bulk Upload of Custom Emoji, but have drawn a blank so I’m asking here what the best future option would look like.
I have a small collection of custom emoji I like to upload into all my Discourses. Some are FontAwesome icons, which I like to have available as :icon-name: in composer posts so that I can explain Discourse UI icons to users. Others are just for fun like a Yorkshire flag. I have them in folders (and they could easily also be online in a GitHub repo I suppose).
I would like to be able to upload these entire folders, in one go, to the Custom Emoji UI. At present the limit on uploads respects the setting of simultaneous_uploads (‘Maximum number of files that can be dragged & dropped in the composer’) site setting, which is limited to a ceiling value of 20 (Error: “simultaneous_uploads: Value must be between 0 and 20.” if you try to increase it higher, even temporarily)
I investigated with interest the other Emoji setting external-emoji-url, which allows one to set a URL for external Emoji set, but sadly this replaces all the ‘standard’ emoji, which I don’t want to lose.
All I really need is for folder upload of custom emoji to work as it currently does for individual custom emoji. Alternatively if there was no limit to the number of uploads that were allowed (perhaps the upload job could be sent to SideKiq to be done async, and PM admins when it’s done, like for bulk invites)
I investigated the use of the Discourse REST API for this but Custom Emoji are not exposed via the REST API. Uploads are exposed in the API, and I did have this working, but even if using the custom_emoji type for an upload it doesn’t appear in the list.
Just wondering what the community thinks would be the best way forward:
- Rake task which automates bulk custom emoji creation?
- Do it in the Rails console?
- Change the admin UI upload limits to allow several hundred uploads in one shot?
- Add ‘folder upload’ to the admin UI?
- Make custom emoji something that I could deploy as a Theme Component which I could add from GitHub URL? (I like the simplicity of this one)
- Allow multiple External emoji URLs so I can have an emoji set AND my custom emoji (perhaps served from a GitHub pages repo)
- Hack together a single ‘emoji and custom emoji’ repo which I can address via URL?
OR - is there another way to get all the FontAwesome icons that Discourse uses in its UI to be available in the composer using :icon-name: syntax? Really the majority of what I want to do is related to this. A site setting that enabled UI icons to be available in the composer would get me 90% there.