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
^22 || ^24;- use the plugin version 0.6 for Node 20;
- Vite
^8- use the plugin version 0.6 for Vite 6 and 7;
Install the plugin using your favourite package manager, for example:
pnpm add -D vite-plugin-material-symbolsAdd it to the Vite configuration:
// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";
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:
moduleIdRegex:
type: RegExp
description: The regex to match module IDs that should be processed for finding icon names
default: /\.([jt])sx?$/i # *.js, *.jsx, *.ts, *.tsx
jsxNodeRegex:
type: RegExp
description: The regex to match JSX nodes that should be processed in parsed AST (e.g. "jsx", "_jsx" or "jsxs")
default: /jsx/
component:
type: string | RegExp
description: The name of JSX component to get the icon names from (or regex to match the component name)
default: Icon
fontUrl:
type: string
description: Material Symbols CSS Provider
# Standard settings: Outlined, no infill, 24px, weight 400
default: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Material+Symbols+Outlined:opsz,wght,FILL,GRAD@24,400,0,0
paramName:
type: string
description: The name of the query parameter to add to the fontUrl
default: icon_names
preload:
type: boolean
description: Enables higher priority for loading symbols
default: false