Using inline SVGs with Rails

Last night I spent about three hours fighting and struggling on how to get insert icons from zondicons and add some classes to them. Needless to say just adding an image_pack_tag was not doing the trick, as I needed something like this

<svg class="my-classes with-style">
  <path ...>
</svg>

...instead of this

<img src="path/to/icon.svg" class="my-classes" />

So I made a helper for this:

module ApplicationHelper
  def zondicon(icon_name, options={})
    file = File.read(Rails.root.join('app', 'javascript', 'images', 'zondicons', "#{icon_name}.svg"))
    doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse file
    svg = doc.at_css 'svg'

    options.each {|attr, value| svg[attr.to_s] = value}

    doc.to_html.html_safe
  end
end

And now in my views I can do this:

<button class="btn btn-blue">
  <%= zondicon('wrench', class: 'fill-current teal-500') %>
  <span>Configure</span>
</button>

There's also a gem called inline_svg for this very purpose, but I decided to go for a simpler approach with no extra dependencies.

Comments

[This Dot Media]

Glad you were able to solve the problem. Thanks for sharing this with your fellow devs 😇