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Magical SVG 🪄

An all-in-one Vite plugin that magically makes working with SVGs and bundling them a breeze.

This plugin lets you import SVG files as components, with advanced pre-processing of assets referenced within SVGs, without the inefficient approach used by other tools. SVGs will be bundled in a spritesheet that is fast and lightweight for the browser. See the backstory for more details.

[!TIP] Can mostly be used as a drop-in replacement of SVGR and similar tools.

Backstory

Inspired by a tweet from Preact's creator Jason Miller, I've been looking at plugins that would let me work with SVGs, as I myself did the error of embedding SVGs as React components. Shame!

What I wanted was a plugin that would let me import SVGs, and make a sprite of symbols and give me the identifier I can use in . And I couldn't find any decent plugin that makes working with them easy. They all had a problem that made using them a pain, or outright impractical. Here's a list of the problems I encountered:

• References in SVG files are never processed. would never get processed and the referenced asset is ignored. • The generated sprite include ALL icons, even unused ones. Just picking the right icons from a pack isn't an option. • There are no options to output to a separate file and reference it. Inlining is apparently the only way. • Selectively tell to not process a specific SVG isn't possible (e.g.: A logo, or SVGs that break when encapsulated in a symbol). • You can't make different sprites, it's only all-in-one.

So I decided to make my own tool to solve all these problems. Introducing: the Magical SVG plugin. 🪄

Install

Usage

[!NOTE] During development, to keep HMR fast and efficient, the sprite is not produced and instead the plugin falls back to embedding the symbol inside the generated component.

Vite plugin setup

Targets

• dom (default): exports a DOM element[^oopsie-dom]. Uses document.createElementNS under the hood. • dom-fn: exports a function you can call (takes no arguments) and returns a DOM element. Uses document.createElementNS under the hood. • dom-template: similar to dom-fn, but leverages document.createElement('template').innerHTML. More compact than dom-fn, but relies on innerHTML. • react19: exports a functional React component (classic runtime) • react19-jsx: exports a functional React component (automatic runtime) • react: exports a functional React component (classic runtime; wrapped in forwardRef) • react-jsx: exports a functional React component (automatic runtime; wrapped in forwardRef) • preact: exports a functional Preact component (classic runtime; wrapped in forwardRef) • preact-jsx: exports a functional Preact component (automatic runtime; wrapped in forwardRef) • vue: exports a Vue component (as if it was a .vue file) • vue-vapor: exports a Vue Vapor[^vapor] component (as if it was a .vue file) • solid: exports a Solid component • ember: exports an Ember component

breaking changes, dom-fn has been introduced with a more sensible behaviour. See [#26].

Use in code

SVG processing

Tree-shaking

If you import an icon but end up not using it, the icon will not be included in the final sprites. If tree-shaking has been disabled in your config, then all imported icons will be included regardless if they've been used or not.

exports note

This plugin does not respect the exports field when importing svg files from third-party packages such as simple-icons, which do not expose them.

Migrating from SVGR

This plugin can mostly be used as a drop-in replacement of SVGR; unless you're dealing with complex SVGs or need to style/animate individual parts of the SVG, the code generated by this plugin should behave just as you're used to, plus the preprocessing of your SVGs.

[!IMPORTANT] Make sure to configure the target, so the plugin produces the correct type of component.

Make sure to enable preserveWidthHeight for best compatibility. This option is not enabled by default as it was not done historically by the plugin, and suddenly doing it would be a breaking change.

Description from the npm listing.