This is a package that generates Elm code for FontAwesome 5. This does not rely on any external javascript (e.g: using the JavaScript library to replace nodes, which can cause issues with Elm), and unlike the font, only includes the icons you use in your Elm code if you minify your output, as well as providing access to the powerful transformation, layering, text, counter, and masking features.

This package works by generating Elm source code using the FontAwesome SVG JavaScript Core.

We load icon packs, then generate Elm functions for each icon. When run, these generate the desired SVG icons. This means no need to rely on any external resources - all the data for the icons and supporting styles is encoded into the Elm package.

This does mean that this is a big package, the compiled Elm code weighs in at over 1MB. This would naturally not be ideal in most situations. The good news is that it is easy to minify out any unused icons thanks to Elm's pure nature. If you are already minifying your compiled Elm (which is good practice anyway), then you don't need to do anything more. If you are not, then it is simple to do.

To start working with the free version, you can install the package directly with elm install lattyware/elm-fontawesome.

If you want to use pro icons, you will need to build the elm package yourself, as you will need access to the pro NPM packages.

Icons can be rendered most simply with FontAwesome.Icon.view, and will result in an svg node.

You can do more complex rendering with FontAwesome.Icon.viewStyled (allowing you to pass attributes to the node), FontAwesome.Icon.viewTransformed (allowing you to customise the icon with graphical transforms), and mask one icon over another with FontAwesome.Icon.viewMasked.

Do note that Svg.Attribute and Html.Attribute are really both just VirtualDom.Attribute, so you can use either, but mixing Svg.Attribute.class and Html.Attribute.class can lead to issues.

The documentation give a complete overview.

General simple use probably looks something like:

go : Html msg
go =
    Html.div [] [ Icon.view Icon.arrowAltCircleRight, Html.text " Go!" ]


loadingMessage : Html msg
loadingMessage =
    Html.div [] [ Icon.viewStyled [ Icon.spin ] Icon.spinner, Html.text " Loading..." ]


noPhotography : Html msg
noPhotography =
    Html.div [ Icon.stack, Icon.fa2x ]
        [ Icon.viewStyled [ Icon.stack1x ] Icon.camera
        , Icon.viewStyled [ Icon.stack2x, HtmlA.style "color" "Tomato" ] Icon.ban
        ]

See this example (and more) live on Ellie

In general, names are just the camel-cased version of the original name. E.g: arrow-alt-circle-right becomes FontAwesome.Solid.arrowAltCircleRight. Where the first character of the name isn't valid as an Elm identifier, the name is prefixed with fa, e.g: 500px becomes FontAwesome.Brands.fa500px. Note this applies to the FontAwesome.Attributes module as well, so 2x becomes FontAwesome.Attributes.fa2x.

FontAwesome does require some CSS styles. You can either use FontAwesome.Styles.css to include an HTML style node with the necessary code directly in your page in Elm, or you can include the CSS from @fortawesome/fontawesome-free/css/svg-with-js.min.css in your page however you choose. Do note you do not need the webfont version - the icons in this package are rendered with SVG, and while that CSS will work, you will make your users load a webfont for no reason.

Font Awesome supports styling your icons in various ways. These styles are exposed as attributes for the various classes in the FontAwesome.Attributes module.

While effort has been made to produce the same output where possible, some differences from the official library do exist:

• We don't produce or consume any data attributes as we won't use them from Elm code anyway.
• When masks are created, the official library generates random IDs to avoid collisions from multiple icons on the same page. In Elm, this would be a real pain to do (you would have to provide randomness and distribute it among icons you use). We instead use fixed IDs based on the icon names by default, which will result in overlapping IDs if the same icon is used repeatedly with masking or titles. To avoid this, you can use the viewWithId view method which will allow you to set an ID manually or using a randomness source as desired.

This normally means you have not included the required CSS.

Mixing Svg.Attribute.class and Html.Attribute.class can cause the classes to get overwritten. This library uses Svg.Attribute.class, so if you always use this when providing attributes to the library you should not have problems.

To build the elm package, you will need to first make sure you have the icon packages you want installed. The possible packages are included as optional dependencies on the node module. For pro icons you will need to have the Fort Awesome Pro NPM registry configured. The build will ignore any missing packages and just not produce the relevant modules. While you could use this to subset the library, In general, this is unnecessary, as tree-shaking achieves the same (and almost always far better) results more easily.

Then run npm build or for the free version npm build-pro for the pro version. The resulting elm library will be output in dist. Unfortunately there is no nice way to work with local packages in Elm as of the time of writing, so you will need to copy the source into your application or use an alternative system.