Include assets (e.g. images, fonts) in themes and components

Documentation Developer Guides
,
1

Themes and theme components allow you to handle uploaded assets such as images and fonts. You can control what assets your theme accepts using the site setting: theme authorized extensions

Including assets in themes and components

For remote themes

Remote themes include:

  • Themes and components installed from the Popular list of themes
  • Themes and components installed using the From a git repository method

To upload assets to a remote theme or theme component, see Create and share a font theme component for a detailed example.

Uploading assets to local themes and components

Local themes include:

  • The default Light and Dark themes that ship with every Discourse instance
  • Themes and components created using the + Create New installation method
  • Themes and components that were uploaded from your local computer using the From your device installation method.

To upload assets to a local theme or theme component, navigate to your theme or component and select + Add in the Uploads section:

uploads
uploads1060×220 7.54 KB

In the Add Upload modal, choose a file and enter a SCSS variable name to use with with your CSS, javascript, and/or handlebars customizations

upload-modal
upload-modal730×534 24.5 KB

Once uploaded, the asset will pop up in the Uploads list:

uploaded-font
uploaded-font556×230 10.5 KB

:warning: Important Note: Do not add uploads to themes and components through the admin interface if the component was installed remotely from a git repository. Updates to the component will clear out any uploads that were not included in the git repository.

How to make use of the assets

SCSS

@font-face {
  font-family: Amazing;
  src: url($Comic-Sans) format("woff2");
}

body {
  font-family: Amazing;
  font-size: 15px;
}

.d-header {
  background-image: url($texture);
}

:informationsource: _When using ttf or otf fonts, be sure to use a format of opentype.

Javascript

// {theme}/javascripts/discourse/api-initializers/init-theme.gjs

import { apiInitializer } from "discourse/lib/api";

export default apiInitializer((api) => {
  console.log(settings.theme_uploads.balloons);
});

HTML

You can’t directly add a theme asset to vanilla HTML (like in the header or after header sections of the customize admin panel). You have to use a handlebars template or the plugin API (more about those in Developing Discourse Themes & Theme Components).

One workaround is to load your asset as a background image using SCSS (like the example above). So in the header section of your theme you might add:

<div class="my-custom-div">
  <a href="/"></a>
</div>

and then in your CSS:

.my-custom-div a {
  height: 50px;
  width: 100px;
  background-image: url($asset-name);
}

Accessing theme uploads as settings

You may also treat theme_uploads as settings in JavaScript (related commit).

This allows themes and components access to theme assets.

Inside theme js you can now get the URL for an asset with:

settings.theme_uploads.name

Additional Information

This document is version controlled - suggest changes on github.

30 Likes