PurgeIcons

Bundles only the icons you use

Think about TailwindCSS + PurgeCSS, but for Icons.

Intro

PurgeIcons is heavily inspired from PurgeCSS. It analyzes your source code or dist files, extracting the icon names you used, and then bundle the icons' data (SVGs) into your code.

You will only get icons you need. No extra bandwidth, no unused icons, no compromise.

Underneath, it's powered by Iconify, which you get access to 80+ popular open source iconsets with over 5,000 icons to choice, including Material Design Icons, Font Awesome, Octicon and even Emojis!

Browser the icon sets in Icônes or Iconify.

Usage

Just like what you used to do for Iconify.

<span class="iconify" data-icon="fa:home"></span>

Or even dynamic

const span = createElement('span')
span.class = 'iconify'
span.data.icon = isDark ? 'carbon:moon' : 'carbon:sun'

// DON'T, PurgeIcons won't extract them correct.
// add them to `included` to be always bundled if you really want this
span.data.icon = `carbon:${isDark ? 'moon' : 'sun'}`

Install

PurgeIcons is designed to be framework independent, but using framework plugins is the most recommended way to get started. Check out the supported frameworks in the following list. We are trying to make more frameworks able to use PurgeIcons out-of-box. Pull requests are great welcome!

Official Plugins

Command Line Interface

The CLI is still working in progress and the design is not yet finalized.

You can either install PurgeIcons as a dev dependency and use the CLI with npx or you can also install PurgeIcons globally:

npm i -g purge-icons

Scan the all the html file and geneted a mjs bundle

purge-icons --content 'src/*.html' --format mjs --output output.js

From multiple sources and use args shorthands, format can be auto inferred from the output option

purge-icons -c 'index.html,src/**/*.vue' -o output.ts

Or export plain json file for other tools to process

purge-icons -c index.html -o output.json

See more options by

purge-icons --help

Programmatic API

Programmatic API is still working in progress as well.

For programmatic use only, you can use @purge-icons/core

npm i -D @purge-icons/core

import { PurgeIconsOptions, PurgeIcons } from '@purge-icons/core'

const code = await PurgeIcons({
  // globs for searching source file to analyze
  content: [
    '**/*.html',
    '**/*.js',
    '**/*.vue', // scan for .vue file as well
  ],
  // whitelist for icons that might be used dynamically
  included: [
    'mdi:account-circle-outline', // from Material Design Icons
    'fa:camera', // from Font Awesome 4
  ],
  format: 'mjs'
})

// code is generated with inlined icons's data, bundle the file and it's done.
fs.promises.writeFiles('./icons.mjs', code, 'utf-8')

Options

export interface PurgeIconsOptions {
  content?: (string | RawContent)[]
  included?: string[]
  extractors?: Extractor[]
  iconSource?: IconSource // default to 'auto'
}

How It Works

Iconify is an icon framework that provide an unified syntax to use icons from its huge collections on-demanded. Each icon set has a id as the prefix of for its icons. For example:

<span class="iconify" data-icon="fa:home"></span>   <!-- Font Awesome -->
<span class="iconify" data-icon="noto:bird"></span> <!-- Note Icons -->
<span class="iconify" data-icon="mdi:alert"></span> <!-- Material Design Icons -->

Iconify achieve that by building up a API service that only send the icons you need. It provides a great flexibility that you can try with different design style and without to worry about including a large amount of unused icons that eat up your bandwidth and slow down your page load.

However, the downside of API querying is that the icons won't be available on the first meaningful paint and your app will be heavy relied on the API servers' status and so its accessability for your users. Iconify also provides the offline solution by implementing frameworks components. In that way, you would need to manually import every icon you use.

Thus, PurgeIcons was born. By scanning your code, it generates bundles for Iconify and load them synchronously. You can use icons in the exact same way as you would with the API based solution.

TODO

• CLI output
• Better caching
• Plugins for frameworks (Vue CLI, Nuxt.js, Next.js, etc.) PR welcome!
• Font-based icons (Javascript Free)

License

MIT License © 2020 Anthony Fu