# How to add more options to color palettes?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-more-options-to-color-palettes/378547>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Tags:** color-palettes\
**Created:** [August 14, 2025, 8:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-more-options-to-color-palettes/378547 "2025-08-14T08:01:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![awesomerobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/awesomerobot/32/142900_2.png) [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)\
**Post date:** [August 14, 2025, 6:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-more-options-to-color-palettes/378547/4 "2025-08-14T18:04:03Z")

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> [@alltiagocom](#):
>
> that means I need to SSH my server (if that’s what the terminology is?) and find that json file, make those changes, and then it would be reflected in the UI?

if you did it this way, I think it would probably get overwritten by the next Discourse update… so generally you want to leave the existing palettes alone

If you want to create a new palette with all the extended color overrides, and make it so users can select that palette, the simplest way is to create a theme and upload it.

All you would have to do in the theme itself is edit about.json to contain the color definitions… there’s an example here:

> <https://github.com/dracula/discourse/blob/master/about.json#L18>

Once the theme is added to the site, the included color palette will be added to `admin/customize/colors` and you can make that user-selectable

Another way to customize our colors is to override them directly with CSS, this would require using a certain theme rather than a specific color palette… but in the theme’s common file you can do something like:

```css`  
`:root {`  
` --primary-low: red;`  
` --secondary: #ff0000;`  
`}`  
``  
you can see all the available colors to override by opening the browser inspector, clicking the HTML element at the top, and doing some scrolling (we have a lot of variables now)

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/d/c/1/dc1fa6663a5d066d966ea447224f4739078d8488.png)

The benefit of this method is that you can do it via the theme editor in the admin UI

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