Icons and SVG Illustrations

We manage our own Icon and Illustration library in the gitlab-svgs repository. This repository is published on npm and managed as a dependency via yarn. You can browse all available Icons and Illustrations here. To upgrade to a new version run yarn upgrade @gitlab/svgs.

Icons

We are using SVG Icons in GitLab with a SVG Sprite. This means the icons are only loaded once, and are referenced through an ID. The sprite SVG is located under /assets/icons.svg.

Our goal is to replace one by one all inline SVG Icons (as those currently bloat the HTML) and also all Font Awesome icons.

Usage in HAML/Rails

To use a sprite Icon in HAML or Rails we use a specific helper function :

sprite_icon(icon_name, size: nil, css_class: '')

icon_name Use the icon_name that you can find in the SVG Sprite (Overview is available here).
size (optional) Use one of the following sizes : 16, 24, 32, 48, 72 (this will be translated into a s16 class)
css_class (optional) If you want to add additional css classes

Example

= sprite_icon('issues', size: 72, css_class: 'icon-danger')

Output from example above

<svg class="s72 icon-danger">
  <use xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="/assets/icons.svg#issues"></use>
</svg>

Usage in Vue

GitLab UI, our components library, provides a component to display sprite icons.

Sample usage :

<script>
import { GlIcon } from "@gitlab/ui";

export default {
  components: {
    GlIcon,
  },
};
<script>

<template>
  <gl-icon
    name="issues"
    :size="24"
  />
</template>

name Name of the Icon in the SVG Sprite (Overview is available here).
size (optional) Number value for the size which is then mapped to a specific CSS class (Available Sizes: 8, 12, 16, 18, 24, 32, 48, 72 are mapped to sXX css classes)
css-classes (optional) Additional CSS Classes to add to the svg tag.

Usage in HTML/JS

Please use the following function inside JS to render an icon: gl.utils.spriteIcon(iconName)

SVG Illustrations

Please use from now on for any SVG based illustrations simple img tags to show an illustration by simply using either image_tag or image_path helpers. Please use the class svg-content around it to ensure nice rendering.

Usage in HAML/Rails

Example

.svg-content
  = image_tag 'illustrations/merge_requests.svg'

Usage in Vue

To use an SVG illustrations in a template provide the path as a property and display it through a standard img tag.

Component:

<script>
export default {
  props: {
    svgIllustrationPath: {
      type: String,
      required: true,
    },
  },
};
<script>

<template>
  <img :src="svgIllustrationPath" />
</template>