Replace Discourse's default SVG icons with custom icons in a theme

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You can replace a Discourse’s default SVG icons individually or as a whole with your own custom SVG and override them within a theme or theme component.

Step 1 - Create an SVG Spritesheet

To get started, you must create an SVG Spritesheet. This can contain anything from a single additional custom SVG icon up to an entire replacement set of hundreds.

The spritesheet should be saved as an SVG file. In principle, you are nesting the <svg> tag contents from the original SVG icon file into <symbol> tags and giving them a nice identifier.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="display: none;">

    <symbol id="mytheme-icon-1">
      <!-- 
      Code inside the <svg> tag from the source SVG icon file
      this is typically everything between the <svg> tags 
      (but not the SVG tag itself, that's replaced by <symbol> above)
      You can transfer any attributes (i.e. ViewBox="0 0 0 0") to the <symbol> tag
      -->
    </symbol>

    <symbol id="mytheme-icon-2">
      <!-- SVG code here. Add more <symbol> blocks as needed.
      -->
    </symbol>

</svg>

  • Be sure to add a custom ID to each symbol in the spritesheet. It’s probably helpful for your sanity to prefix your IDs with your theme name mytheme-icon.

  • To have the icon color to be dynamic like the existing icons, set the fill to currentColor rather than a hardcoded color (like #333)

  • To scale or correctly centre your icon, utilise a viewBox attribute on the <symbol> tag. See How to Scale SVG | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks for more information.

  • Be on the lookout for style collisions within your SVGs. For example, SVGs will often have an inline style like .st0{fill:#FF0000;} defined. If you have multiple SVGs using the same classes this can cause issues (to fix these issues, edit the classes to be unique to each icon).

  • If you have many icons, there are ways to automate this. svg-sprite-generator - npm is a simple command line tool for combining SVGs into a spritesheet.

Example - single custom icon spritesheet

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="display: none;">
   <symbol id="bat-icon" viewBox="6 6 36 36">
      <path fill="currentColor" d="M24,18.2c0.7,0,0.9,0.2,0.9,0.2l0.4-1.7c0,0,0.4,1.5,0.4,2.8c0.2,1.1,2.2,0.4,3.9,0C31.4,19.1,32,16,32,16h16c0,0-9.4,3.5-7,10c0,0-14.8-2-17,7l0,0c-2.2-9-17-7-17-7c2.4-6.5-7-10-7-10h16c0,0,0.6,3.1,2.3,3.5c1.7,0.4,3.9,1.1,3.9,0c0.2-1.1,0.4-2.8,0.4-2.8l0.4,1.7C23.1,18.4,23.4,18.2,24,18.2L24,18.2L24,18.2z"/>
   </symbol>
</svg>

Step 2 - Add the spritesheet to your theme

Once your spritesheet is built, you need to add the SVG file to your component/theme. This is easy via the UI, or you can hard code it into a component/theme.

:information_source: Once it is uploaded to any installed component/theme, it is available throughout your instance using the ID in the <symbol> tag.

Via the UI

Go to the Uploads section of the theme/component settings and add your sprite file with a SCSS var name of icons-sprite:

image

Hardcode into a Theme / Component

Add the spritesheet file to the Theme’s /assets folder. Then update your assets.json file in the root folder.
For an SVG sprite called my-icons.svg, your assets.json should include this:

"assets": {
   "icons-sprite": "/assets/my-icons.svg"
}

Step 3 (optional) - Overriding default icons

Now that your spritesheet is set, you can tell Discourse to replace icons. This is how you do it (you can add this to your header.html file)

<script type="text/discourse-plugin" version="0.8">
  api.replaceIcon('bars', 'mytheme-icon-bars');
  api.replaceIcon('link', 'mytheme-icon-link');
  <!-- etc -->
</script>

The first ID, bars, is the default icon ID in Discourse and the second is the ID of your replacement icon. The easiest way to find an ID of one of our icons is to inspect the icon in your browser.

Here the icon name follows the d-icon- prefix. So in this example it’s d-unliked

43%20PM
43%20PM1038×208 36.6 KB

Most of our icons follow the icon names from https://fontawesome.com/, but there are exceptions (which is why checking the ID in your inspector is the most reliable method). You can see all the exceptions in the const REPLACEMENTS block here on github.

That’s it. You can now style Discourse with your own custom icons!

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