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Dries Vints

The New Blade Icons Release

First published on June 21, 2020 · Last updated on June 22, 2020

About two weeks ago I announced the new release for Blade Icons. The new version is a merger of Blade SVG by Adam Wathan and the previous Blade Icons library that I built. Together it makes for a powerful tool when working with SVG icons.

If you don't know yet what Blade Icons is, let's review it briefly. Blade Icons allows you to reference and manipulate SVG icons easily. Instead of pasting SVG code in your app:

<svg fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke="currentColor">
  <path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" d="M3 9a2 2 0 012-2h.93a2 2 0 001.664-.89l.812-1.22A2 2 0 0110.07 4h3.86a2 2 0 011.664.89l.812 1.22A2 2 0 0018.07 7H19a2 2 0 012 2v9a2 2 0 01-2 2H5a2 2 0 01-2-2V9z"/>
  <path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" d="M15 13a3 3 0 11-6 0 3 3 0 016 0z"/>
</svg>

You can reference icons by using Blade components:

<x-heroicon-o-camera class="h-6 w-6 text-blue-500" />

This allows for a much more easier to use syntax. Besides the benefit of fewer lines of code, it's easier to see which icons you're using. And applying attributes is a breeze.

Icon Sets

The most notable new feature for the library is the introduction of icon sets. This allows you to use several icon sets in a single app instead of one.

If we look at the config file of Blade Icons we'll see that we can define multiple sets. It ships with a default set that points to your resources/svg directory:

<?php

return [
    'sets' => [
        'default' => [
            'path' => 'resources/svg',
            'prefix' => 'icon',
        ],
        'feather' => [
            'path' => 'resources/feather-icons',
            'prefix' => 'feather',
        ],
    ],
];

This way you can reference icons from several sets:

<x-icon-bell />

<x-feather-cloud />

One other cool thing about this feature is that this now allows for third party packages to integrate with Blade Icons and ship their own icon sets. To demonstrate this I've extracted the Heroicons and Zondicons icon sets that shipped with the previous iteration into separate packages:

People have already started building their own third party packages!

Directive & Helper

By merging with Blade SVG, Blade Icons now also features an @svg directive and svg() helper to reference icons:

@svg('icon-camera')

{{ svg('feather-cloud') }}

These two methods also allow you to reference icons from the default set without their prefix:

@svg('camera')

{{ svg('camera') }}

And the svg() helper allows you to use a fluent syntax to set attributes:

{{ svg('camera')->id('settings-icon')->dataFoo('bar')->dataBaz() }}

Conclusion

There's more configuration options so definitely have a look at the readme if you want to discover everything new about Blade Icons. I'm hoping you'll like the new iteration of Blade Icons and that it'll be useful to you in your apps!

About me

I'm a software engineer from Belgium. I work as one of the core team members of Laravel, the popular PHP framework.

I'm also the creator of Eventy, a platform that connects the dots between user groups, speakers, conferences and attendees.

My passions are open-source, growing communities, and building products that people love.

© Dries Vints