Is there a way to manually update .icons in Material for MkDocs?

[Andre601]

Was wondering if there was a way to update the collections of Icons Material for MkDocs offers locally, without having to download the SVG in question and include it via theme overriding.

There's an icon I would like to use, but from what I can tell does it require me to either use the main branch of this repo as a Pip install (which can be risky due to possible bugs), or wait for the next update to become available.

Perhaps it could be an idea to have this as a sort of separate dependency, so that it could be updated separately by people when needed (if there isn't another option already I've not mentioned)?

[santaimpersonator]

For adding a single icon, downloading the icon's *.svg file into the /overrides/.icon/ directory is the easiest method.

---

There's an icon I would like to use, but from what I can tell does it require me to either use the main branch of this repo as a Pip install (which can be risky due to possible bugs), or wait for the next update to become available.

• Maybe, I misunderstood your grammar? 🤔
  • Your statement only made sense when reworded this way:

    There's an icon I would like to use, but from what I can tell... it does ...require me to either use the main branch of this repo as a Pip install (which can be risky due to possible bugs), or wait for the next update to become available.

• From my experience, their releases are pretty stable and not buggy
  • I guess you could subscribe to their releases to wait for them to adopt a new version of the icon set you want to use, but you might be waiting a while
  • You'll probably want to check the commits to the package-lock.json file, for each release: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/commits/master/package-lock.json
• Not sure about the logic of posting this here, but not wanting to use this theme (i.e. the mkdocs-material Python package).
  • You have to install this package anyways to build your documentation with this theme.

Perhaps it could be an idea to have this as a sort of separate dependency, so that it could be updated separately by people when needed (if there isn't another option already I've not mentioned)?

Note

I assume you thought that the icon sets functioned like the MkDocs plugins, which are primarily based on Python packages. However, they are not.

To manually update the icon set to their latest package, you'd have to start with looking into their build process for how it's bundled. However, I wouldn't recommend this, as it's more work than the method that is already documented.

If you want to go down the rabbit-hole:

• Start with the build workflow here: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/master/.github/workflows/build.yml
• It looks like the icons are:
  • Packaged using node.js: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/master/package-lock.json
  • Manually added to this repo, for their documentation: 49daf57

---

Otherwise, you can manually inject the HTML code for the icon, for every instance that you need to use it. You just need to wrap it with the .twemoji CSS class, as mentioned here:

<span class="twemoji">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" ...>...</svg>
</span>