gulp-svg-sprite

is a Gulp plugin wrapping around svg-sprite which takes a bunch of SVG files, optimizes them and bakes them into SVG sprites of several types:

• Traditional CSS sprites for use as background images,
• CSS sprites with pre-defined <view> elements, useful for foreground images as well,
• inline sprites using the <defs> element,
• inline sprites using the <symbol> element
• and SVG stacks.

Features & configuration? → svg-sprite

This document covers only gulp specific installation and configuration aspects. For a full list of features and options, please see the svg-sprite manual.

Usage

First, install gulp-svg-sprite as a development dependency:

npm install --save-dev gulp-svg-sprite

Then, add it to your gulpfile.js:

const gulp = require('gulp');
const svgSprite = require('gulp-svg-sprite');

gulp.src('path/to/assets/*.svg')
  .pipe(svgSprite(/* ... Insert your configuration here ... */))
  .pipe(gulp.dest('out'));

NOTICE: By default, svg-sprite doesn't send any files downstream unless you configure it. There are tons of options available — please see below for some basic examples. Also, you should possibly take care of errors that might occur.

API

svgSprite(options)

As options argument you may provide a main configuration object as described in the svg-sprite manual. Configuration-wise, svg-sprite and gulp-svg-sprite differ only in one respect:

options.dest

Type: String Default value: '.'

With Gulp, there is no need to specifiy a main output directory, as the generated files are piped to the next step of the running task anyway. The options.dest value (if given) is simply ignored.

Examples

Basic example

In this very basic example, mostly default settings will be applied to create a traditional CSS sprite (bundle of SVG sprite and CSS stylesheet).

const gulp = require('gulp');
const svgSprite = require('gulp-svg-sprite');
// Basic configuration example
const config = {
  mode: {
    css: { // Activate the «css» mode
      render: {
        css: true // Activate CSS output (with default options)
      }
    }
  }
};

gulp.src('**/*.svg', { cwd: 'path/to/assets' })
  .pipe(svgSprite(config))
  .pipe(gulp.dest('out'));

The following files and directories are created:

out/
├─ css/
│  ├─ sprite.css
│  ├─ svg/
│  │  ├─ sprite.css-495d2010.svg

The cryptical looking part in the SVG's file name is the result of svg-sprite's cache busting feature which is enabled by default for CSS sprites. We'll turn this off in the next example.

Gulp 4 basic example

const { src, dest, parallel } = require('gulp');
const svgSprite = require('gulp-svg-sprite');

// Basic configuration example
const svgspriteConfig = {
  mode: {
    css: { // Activate the «css» mode
      render: {
        css: true // Activate CSS output (with default options)
      }
    }
  }
};

function buildSvg() {
  return src('**/*.svg', { cwd: 'src/assets' })
    .pipe(svgSprite(svgspriteConfig))
    .pipe(dest('out'));
}

exports.default = parallel(buildSvg);

More complex example

The following example is a little more complex:

• We'll create a «view» CSS sprite and a «symbol» sprite in one go.
• Instead of CSS, we'll render a Sass stylesheet resource for the «view» sprite.
• We'll turn off cache busting for the «view» sprite and create extra CSS rules specifying each shape's dimensions.
• We'll downscale the SVG shapes to 32×32 pixels if necessary and add 10 pixels padding to all sides.
• We'll keep the intermediate SVG source files.

const gulp = require('gulp');
const svgSprite = require('gulp-svg-sprite');
// More complex configuration example
const config = {
  shape: {
    dimension: { // Set maximum dimensions
      maxWidth: 32,
      maxHeight: 32
    },
    spacing: { // Add padding
      padding: 10
    },
    dest: 'out/intermediate-svg' // Keep the intermediate files
  },
  mode: {
    view: { // Activate the «view» mode
      bust: false,
      render: {
        scss: true // Activate Sass output (with default options)
      }
    },
    symbol: true // Activate the «symbol» mode
  }
};

gulp.src('**/*.svg', { cwd: 'path/to/assets' })
  .pipe(svgSprite(config))
  .pipe(gulp.dest('out'));

The following files and directories are created:

out/
├─ intermediate-svg
│  ├─ weather-clear.svg
│  ├─ weather-snow.svg
│  ├─ weather-storm.svg
├─ symbol/
│  ├─ svg/
│     ├─ sprite.symbol.svg
├─ view/
│  ├─ sprite.scss
│  ├─ svg/
│     ├─ sprite.view.svg

Error handling

Errors might always happen — maybe there are some corrupted source SVG files, the default SVGO plugin configuration is too aggressive or there's just an error in svg-sprite's code. To make your tasks more robust, you might consider using plumber and adding your custom error handling:

const gulp = require('gulp');
const svgSprite = require('gulp-svg-sprite');
const plumber = require('gulp-plumber');

// Basic configuration example
const config = {
  mode: {
    css: {
      render: {
        css: true
      }
    }
  }
};

gulp.src('**/*.svg', { cwd: '' })
  .pipe(plumber())
  .pipe(svgSprite(config))
  .on('error', function(error) {
    /* Do some awesome error handling ... */
  })
  .pipe(gulp.dest('out'));

Advanced features

For more advanced features like

• custom transformation,
• meta data injection,
• customizing output templates or
• introducing new output formats

please refer to the svg-sprite manual.

Changelog

Please refer to the GitHub releases for a complete release history.

Legal

Copyright © 2018 Joschi Kuphal joschi@kuphal.net / @jkphl. svg-sprite is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. The contained example SVG icons are part of the Tango Icon Library and belong to the Public Domain.