Fathym Atomic Icons

Fathym’s Atomic Icons is a library that supports the optimized creation of customzied icon sets for delivery via Deno Fresh.

Getting Started

To get started, you can add an import map to your deno configuration.

"imports": {
  ...
  "@fathym/atomic-icons": "https://deno.land/x/fathym_atomic_icons/mod.ts",
  ...
},

NOTE: It is best to use a specific version of the fathym_atomic_icons library in the import map.

Naming Icons in an Icon Set

It can be tempting to want to leverage the ids of the icons you pull in from a library. However, we recommend that you rename them to fit a more generic usage. For example, instead of using the Icones id material-symbols-check-circle, we like to use something like close. This makes it simple from an atomic usage perspective, as anywhere a close icon is needed, we use this icon.

Automatic Configuration with Fresh

Fathym Atomic Icons can be delivered as a plugin for Deno Fresh, built on top of the utilities we will detail out further down this doc.

To get running, the first thing that we will need to do is setup our fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts file.

import { IconSetConfig, IconSetGenerateConfig } from '@fathym/atomic-icons';

export const curIconSetConfig: IconSetConfig = {
  IconMap: {
    'x-circle': 'https://api.iconify.design/bi:x-circle.svg',
    'check-circle': 'https://api.iconify.design/material-symbols:check-circle.svg',
    exclaim: 'https://api.iconify.design/bi:exclamation-circle.svg',
  },
  Optimize: true
};

export const curIconSetGenerateConfig: IconSetGenerateConfig = {
  Exports: true,
  IconSet: curIconSetConfig,
  SpriteSheet: './iconset/icons',
};

Notice the use of the Optimize: true configuration, this will ensure that SVGO is used to optimize the sprite sheet that is created. To disable sprite sheet optimization, set the value to false.

Now we need to register our plugin in the fresh.config.ts file:

...
import { curIconSetGenerateConfig } from "./fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts";
import { iconSetPlugin } from "@fathym/atomic-icons";
...

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    ...
    await iconSetPlugin(curIconSetGenerateConfig),
    ...
  ],
});

Two things will happen when this plugin is configured:

1. Anytime that the icon set configurations are updated, new explicit icon components will be generated.
2. A new route will be configured that will render the most up to date sprite sheet for the icon set.

Alternatively you can supply only the curIconSetConfig to disable the automatic component generation, keeping only the sprite generation.

...
import { curIconSetConfig } from './fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts';
import { iconSetPlugin } from "@fathym/atomic-icons";
...

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    ...
    await iconSetPlugin(curIconSetConfig),
    ...
  ],
});

That’s it, you can now use your Icons in a number of various ways, taking note that the sprite sheet is available on the path specified in config /iconset/icons.

import {
  CheckCircleIcon,
  ExclaimIcon,
  Icon,
  XCircleIcon,
} from "$fathym/atomic-icons";

export default function Page() {
  const iconSheet = `./iconset/icons`;

  const icons = ["check-circle", "exclaim"];

  return (
    <>
      <Icon src="./iconset/icons" icon="x-circle" />

      {icons.map((icon) => (
        <Icon
          src={iconSheet}
          icon={icon}
          class="text-blue-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]"
        />
      ))}

      <XCircleIcon />

      <CheckCircleIcon class="text-purple-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]" />

      <ExclaimIcon class="text-purple-500 w-[24px] h-[24px]" />
    </>
  );
}

Icon Sources

Any SVG can be shifted into a sprite sheet, the following sites provide a nice place to find the icons you want to use in your organizations customized icon set.

Icônes(https://icones.js.org/collection/all)

Simple Icons (https://simpleicons.org/)

Simple Icons (https://flowbite.com/icons)

Custom Workflows

Following we will look at the individual parts that make up the whole, allowing you to customize your workflow.

Manual Sprite Setup

If you have an existing SVG sprite sheet, you can use it by placing it in the static folder of your Deno Fresh project. If you want to start creating your own icon set sprite sheet, you can start from this one:

<svg
   xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
   xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
 >
    <defs>
        <symbol viewBox="0 0 16 16" id="x-circle"><g fill="currentColor"><path d="M8 15A7 7 0 1 1 8 1a7 7 0 0 1 0 14zm0 1A8 8 0 1 0 8 0a8 8 0 0 0 0 16z"></path><path d="M4.646 4.646a.5.5 0 0 1 .708 0L8 7.293l2.646-2.647a.5.5 0 0 1 .708.708L8.707 8l2.647 2.646a.5.5 0 0 1-.708.708L8 8.707l-2.646 2.647a.5.5 0 0 1-.708-.708L7.293 8L4.646 5.354a.5.5 0 0 1 0-.708z"></path></g></symbol>
        
        <symbol viewBox="0 0 24 24" id="check-circle"><path fill="currentColor" d="m10.6 16.6l7.05-7.05l-1.4-1.4l-5.65 5.65l-2.85-2.85l-1.4 1.4l4.25 4.25ZM12 22q-2.075 0-3.9-.788t-3.175-2.137q-1.35-1.35-2.137-3.175T2 12q0-2.075.788-3.9t2.137-3.175q1.35-1.35 3.175-2.137T12 2q2.075 0 3.9.788t3.175 2.137q1.35 1.35 2.138 3.175T22 12q0 2.075-.788 3.9t-2.137 3.175q-1.35 1.35-3.175 2.138T12 22Z"></path></symbol>
    </defs>
 </svg>

With our sprite sheet in hand and references added, we can now use the basic <Icon /> control. You’ll need to import the Icon and then use it in your JSX

import { Icon } from "@fathym/atomic-icons";

export default function Page() {
  return (
    <>
      <Icon src="./icons.sprite.svg" icon="x-circle" />

      <Icon src="./icons.sprite.svg" icon="check-circle" />
    </>
  );
}

You can also leverage tailwind styles to start controlling the icons look and feel:

<Icon
  src="./icons.sprite.svg"
  icon="x-circle"
  class="text-red-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]"
/>;

Sprite Sheet Configuration

Manually copying SVG and Symbol content into our sprite sheet is not really the way we want to manage change. Instead, we can leverage some tooling from this library. To start, let’s make sure we have a fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts file at the root of our project. Then, in the scripts directory,

import { curIconSetConfig } from '../fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts';
import { useFileIconSet } from '@fathym/atomic-icons';

await useFileIconSet('./static/icons.sprite.svg', curIconSetConfig);

Then let’s add a new task to our deno.json file:

"tasks": {
  ...
  "icons": "deno run -A ./scripts/icons.atomic.ts",
  ...
},

And now we can easily generate our sprite sheet after updating the SVG maps:

deno task icons

This will generate an SVG at the file path given in useFileIconSet. Now we can use the icons just as before:

import { Icon } from "@fathym/atomic-icons";

export default function Page() {
  return (
    <>
      <Icon src="./icons.sprite.svg" icon="x-circle" />

      <Icon src="./icons.sprite.svg" icon="check-circle" />

      <Icon src="./icons.sprite.svg" icon="exclaim" />
    </>
  );
}

Component Generation

Its nice to have a simple way to access our icon set from the sprite sheet, but again we may want to extend this further to provide specific components for use with each icon. In this way, we can use type safe components like:

import {
  CheckCircleIcon,
  ExclaimIcon,
  XCircleIcon,
} from "$fathym/atomic-icons";

export default function Page() {
  return (
    <>
      <XCircleIcon />

      <CheckCircleIcon />

      <ExclaimIcon />
    </>
  );
}

To achieve this, we will again need to invoke some tooling. Let’s head back into the ./scripts/icons.atomic.ts file and we can configure the generation of our icons. We can go ahead and add the generation call here:

import { curIconSetGenerateConfig } from '../fathym-atomic-icons.config.ts';
import { useFileIconSet, useIconSetComponents } from '@fathym/atomic-icons';

await useFileIconSet('./static/icons.sprite.svg', curIconSetGenerateConfig.IconSet);

await useIconSetComponents(curIconSetGenerateConfig);

And again we can run our task to not only generate the sprite sheet, but also the icon components:

deno task icons

Make sure you add build/ to your .gitignore file. Then, as mentioned above, you can now use your custom icon components with ease:

import {
  CheckCircleIcon,
  ExclaimIcon,
  XCircleIcon,
} from "$fathym/atomic-icons";

export default function Page() {
  return (
    <>
      <XCircleIcon class="text-purple-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]" />

      <CheckCircleIcon class="text-purple-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]" />

      <ExclaimIcon class="text-purple-500 w-[50px] h-[50px]" />
    </>
  );
}

Thank You’s

Thank you out to the following people for their work on some of the concepts developed into this project.

https://rodneylab.com/deno-fresh-svg-sprites/

https://benadam.me/thoughts/react-svg-sprites/