SVG icons have become a good replacement for bitmap files and font icons. Ian Feather, a Front End Developer at Lonely Planet wrote an excellent blog post about why SVG icons rule and I agree with him. Nevertheless, I didn’t find any good guides for a SVG icon build system so I decided to share my build configuration.

This build system will..

Minimize large SVG icons (remove Adobe Illustrator overhead), this usually results in around 70% smaller files.

Paint icons into m u l t i p l e c o l o r s

Generate inline CSS SVG styles (IE9+ support, example)

Generate inline CSS Bitmap styles (IE8+ support, example)

Generate PNG files (for those unlucky supporting IE7 and lower)

Generate an icons styleguide (example).

Getting started

You need to have node.js, npm (installs with Node.js) and Grunt installed.

We will use these Grunt plugins:

grunt-contrib-clean – Cleans directories before running the task

grunt-svgmin – Minimizes SVG files

grunt-grunticon – Generates and paints CSS and PNG files.

Install them:

npm install grunt-contrib-clean --save-dev npm install grunt-svgmin --save-dev npm install grunt-grunticon --save-dev

The Gruntfile

Grunt uses Gruntfile ( .js or .coffee ) for build configurations.

This will be our Gruntfile.js :

module.exports = function(grunt) { // Project configuration. grunt.initConfig({ pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'), clean: ['svg_icons/compressed', 'svg_icons/output'], //removes old data svgmin: { //minimize SVG files options: { plugins: [ { removeViewBox: false }, { removeUselessStrokeAndFill: false } ] }, dist: { expand: true, cwd: 'svg_icons/raw', src: ['*.svg'], dest: 'svg_icons/compressed', ext: '.colors-light-danger-success.svg' } }, grunticon: { //makes SVG icons into a CSS file myIcons: { files: [{ expand: true, cwd: 'svg_icons/compressed', src: ['*.svg'], dest: 'svg_icons/output' }], options: { cssprefix: '.icon-', colors: { light: '#ccc', danger: '#ed3921', success: '#8DC63F' } } } } }); grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-clean'); grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-svgmin'); grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-grunticon'); // Task(s). grunt.registerTask('icons', ['clean', 'svgmin', 'grunticon']); };

Setting up SVG icons

Put your SVG icons into svg_icons/raw/ directory (relative to the directory where your Gruntfile is). Give them descriptive names because these will later match your CSS styles (e.g. arrow-left, arrow-right).

Defining colors

Grunticon uses icon naming to define different colors. We can make Svgmin generate files with a custom extension, where we define what colors we need. To add a color change colors under the grunticon task and add a key/value pair like this: danger: '#ff0000' .

NB! Do not name your keys after CSS color names. Names such as red, blue or lightGray will not work.

Next add the key under Svgmin task’s ext property: ext: '.colors-danger.svg' . Colors are seperated using the - (dash) sign.

Removing icon painting

If you don’t wish to paint your icons remove the colors hash from Grunticon and under Svgmin set ext: '.svg' .

Running the task

Run the task using

grunt icons

Grunt will generate two directories – svg_icons/compressed/ and svg_icons/output/ . svg_icons/compressed/ directory holds the minimzed SVG files, you can ignore this directory. All your generated icons will be in the svg_icons/output/ directory.

And that’s it! You have successfully set up your SVG icons building system.