Material Symbols is a font-based alternative to SVG icons. Compared to Material Icons, which are packed into a bundle, thereby increasing its size, font-based symbols are loaded on the user side upon request.
However, the difficulty is that they are either loaded all at once, which is also quite a large volume, or it is
necessary to specify a list of icon_names for filtering the font, which must also be sorted. Therefore, it is
necessary to maintain the list of icons used within the application.
The plugin automates that job by determining which icons are used in the source code of the application and during the
build substitutes that list into index.html for selective download from Google Font CDN, thus reducing the volume of
the font downloaded by the user.
- Node.js
^20 || ^22; - Vite
^6.0.0(though, it might work with v5 as well).
Install the plugin using your favourite package manager, for example:
yarn add -D vite-plugin-material-symbolsAdd it to the Vite configuration:
// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react-swc";
import materialSymbols from "vite-plugin-material-symbols";
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [react(), materialSymbols()],
});Ensure having <head> tag in your index.html.
Ensure assigning the required className to your icons.
When using Material UI it can be globally configured:
const theme = createTheme({
components: {
MuiIcon: {
defaultProps: {
/* @see https://fonts.google.com/icons?icon.set=Material+Symbols */
className: "material-symbols-outlined", // or -rounded or -sharp
},
},
},
});Consider a sample React component using MUI Icon:
import Stack from "@mui/material/Stack";
import Icon from "@mui/material/Icon";
const Component = () => (
<Stack gap={2}>
<Icon>home</Icon>
<Icon>chevron_right</Icon>
<Icon>comment</Icon>
</Stack>
);After running vite build, the <link> tag will be added to your index.html having the list of required icon names:
<link
href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Material+Symbols+Outlined:opsz,wght,FILL,GRAD@24,400,0,0&icon_names=chevron_right,comment,home"
rel="stylesheet"
/>The plugin substitutes the icon_names URL parameter ONLY in vite build mode. In vite dev (serve) mode
index.html is transformed before the application source code, so that all Material Symbols are loaded.
The plugin accepts an object of the following options:
component:
type: string
description: The name of JSX component to obtain the icon names from
default: Icon
getUrl:
type: function
description: Material Symbols CSS Provider
arguments: [string] # icon_names parameter
exampleArguments: ["icon_names=chevron_right,comment,home"] # can be empty string
returns: string # the URL
default: (iconNamesParam) => `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Material+Symbols+Outlined:opsz,wght,FILL,GRAD@24,400,0,0&${iconNamesParam}`
preload:
type: boolean
description: Enables higher priority for loading symbols
default: false