Introducing Icons: Add any icon library to your Ruby app

#ruby #rails #webdev #design

This article was originally published on Rails Designer Blog

Almost two years ago I announced Rails Icons. I started that article with the notion I have no app where I do not use icons. That is still true today.

I also still use Rails for all my SaaS' apps, but what if you do not? What if you use one of the many other amazing Ruby frameworks, like Hanami, Rodauth or maybe Padrino? Or what if instead of Perron (a Rails-based SSG), you use Jekyll, Middleman or Bridgetown?

You cannot use the elegant way of adding SVG icons, of any of the small dozen icon libraries, in your app or site. Sad! 😞

So, ~210k downloads later, I extracted the core (Ruby) part from Rails Icons into its own gem: Icons. ⭐

So now Rails Icons core features rely on the Icons gem and only the Rails-specific parts (helper and generators) live in the Rails Icons gem itself, all while the usage of Rails Icons remains as it was.

This new set up allows you to either build your own layer, like Rails Icons, around Icons and package it into a gem or use it directly in your Ruby app.

For the latter it will look like this:

# Sync any of the supported libraries from their respective (GitHub) repository
Icons::Sync.new("lucide").now

# And then to render an icon
icon = Icons::Icon.new(name: "check", library: "lucide", variant: "outline", arguments: { class: "text-gray-500" })
svg = icon.svg