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Matt Swensen
Matt Swensen

Posted on • Originally published at mjswensen.com on

How to Make an .ico File Using the macOS Terminal

Suppose you have an icon or logo at multiple resolutions and would like to combine them into a single favicon.ico file for your website. These are the commands you need to get up and running from the comfort of your own terminal.

Step 1: install ImageMagick

Check out the ImageMagick downloads page for instructions on how to get it running on your machine. Personally, I like to use containerization to keep my Mac free from extraneous software that I rarely use, so I’ll install ImageMagick in a Docker container instead (make sure you have Docker installed):

docker run -it --rm -v /absolute/path/to/icons/directory:/workdir -w /workdir ubuntu
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This command will drop you into a bash session on the container. From there, it’s easy to get ImageMagick installed:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install -y imagemagick
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Tip!

ImageMagick has a dependency on tzdata, so you will be prompted to configure your time zone upon installation. Since this is an ephemeral installation, you can just type 1 for each prompt to get through the installation process quickly.

Step 2: create the file

ImageMagick gives us a handy convert command that makes the process super easy:

convert input-file-16x16.png input-file-24x24.png input-file-32x32.png input-file-64x64.png favicon.ico
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This will create the desired favicon.ico file.

Step 3: verify the .ico file

ImageMagick also provides a nice utility called identify for inspecting our file to ensure it is formatted as we expect.

identify favicon.ico
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The output should look something like this:

favicon.ico[0] ICO 16x16 16x16+0+0 8-bit sRGB 0.000u 0:00.000
favicon.ico[1] ICO 24x24 24x24+0+0 8-bit sRGB 0.000u 0:00.000
favicon.ico[2] ICO 32x32 32x32+0+0 8-bit sRGB 0.000u 0:00.000
favicon.ico[3] ICO 64x64 64x64+0+0 8-bit sRGB 24838B 0.000u 0:00.000
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