Font Awesome 5 React component

$ npm i --save @fortawesome/fontawesome
$ npm i --save @fortawesome/react-fontawesome

or

$ yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome
$ yarn add @fortawesome/react-fontawesome

You can use Font Awesome icons in your React components as simply as this:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="coffee"/>

That simple usage is made possible when you add the "coffee" icon, to the library, or when externally loading icon bundles that include the icon.

These are two of the three ways you can use Font Awesome 5 with React. We'll summarize all three ways briefly and then get into the details of each below.

1. Explicit Import

   Allows icons to be subsetted, optimizing your final bundle. Only the icons you import are included in the bundle. However, explicitly importing icons into each of many components in your app might become tedious, so you may want to build a library.

2. Build a Library

   Explicitly import icons just once in some init module. Then add them to the library. Then reference any of them by icon name as a string from any component. No need to import the icons into each component once they're in the library.

3. External Loading

   If you're in a situation where the icons have been loaded externally, outside of your React component with a <script> tag, then your React component can reference those icons instead of doing its own import. You reference them from your React component just as if you'd added them to the library: using the icons names as strings.

For this example, we'll also reference the @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid module, so make sure you've added it to the project as well:

$ npm i --save @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid

or

$ yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid

Now, a simple React component might look like this:

import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import FontAwesomeIcon from '@fortawesome/react-fontawesome'
import faCoffee from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid/faCoffee'

const element = (
  <FontAwesomeIcon icon={faCoffee} />
)

ReactDOM.render(element, document.body)

Notice that the faCoffee icon is imported from @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid as an object and then provided to the icon prop as an object.

Explicitly importing icons like this allows us to subset Font Awesome's thousands of icons to include only those you use in your final bundled file.

You probably want to use our icons in more than one component in your app, right?

But with explicit importing, it could become tedious to import into each of your app's components every icon you want to reference in that component.

So, add them to the library. Do this setup once in some initializing module of your app, adding all of the icons you'll use in your app's React components.

Suppose App.js initializes my app, including the library. For this example, we'll add two individual icons, faCheckSquare and faCoffee. We also add all of the brands in @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands. This example would illustrate the benefits of building a library even more clearly if it involved fifty or a hundred icons, but we'll keep the example brief and leave it to your imagination as to how this might scale up with lots of icons.

Don't forget to add @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands:

$ npm i --save @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands

or

$ yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands

In App.js, where our app is initialized:

import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import fontawesome from '@fortawesome/fontawesome'
import FontAwesomeIcon from '@fortawesome/react-fontawesome'
import brands from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands'
import faCheckSquare from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid/faCheckSquare'
import faCoffee from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid/faCoffee'

fontawesome.library.add(brands, faCheckSquare, faCoffee)

OK, so what's happening here?

In our call to fontawesome.library.add() we're passing

• brands: which represents all of the brand icons in @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands. So any of the brand icons in that package may be referenced by icon name as a string anywhere else in our app. For example: "apple", "microsoft", or "google".
• faCheckSquare and faCoffee: Adding each of these icons individually allows us to refer to them throughout our app by their icon string names, "check-square" and "coffee", respectively.

Now, suppose you also have React components Beverage and Gadget in your app. You don't have to re-import your icons into them. Just import the FontAwesomeIcon component, and when you use it, supply the icon prop an icon name as a string.

We'll make Beverage.js a functional component:

import React from 'react'
import FontAwesomeIcon from '@fortawesome/react-fontawesome'

const Beverage = () => (
    <div>
        <FontAwesomeIcon icon="check-square"/>
        Favorite beverage: <FontAwesomeIcon icon="coffee"/>
    </div>
)

export default Beverage

There's one another piece of magic that's happening in the background when providing icon names as strings like this: the fas prefix (for Font Awesome Solid) is being inferred as the default. Later, we'll look at what that means and how we can do something different than the default.

Now suppose Gadget.js looks like this:

import React from 'react'
import FontAwesomeIcon from '@fortawesome/react-fontawesome'

const Gadget = () => (
  <div>
    <FontAwesomeIcon icon="check-square"/>
    Popular gadgets come from vendors like:
      <FontAwesomeIcon icon={["fab", "apple"]}/>
      <FontAwesomeIcon icon={["fab", "microsoft"]}/>
      <FontAwesomeIcon icon={["fab", "google"]}/>
  </div>
)

export default Gadget

Notice:

• We used the "check-square" icon name again in this component, though we didn't have to explicitly import it into this component. With one explicit import of that icon in App.js, and adding it to the library, we've managed to use it by name in multiple components.
• We used the "apple", "microsoft", and "google" brand icons, which were never explicitly individually imported, but they're available to us by name as strings because brands was added to our library in App.js, and brands includes all of those icons.
• We added the fab prefix to reference those brand icons.

Adding a prefix—and the syntax we used to do it—are new. So what's going on here?

First, recall when we introduced <FontAwesomeIcon icon="coffee"/> and learned that a prefix of fas was being added to "coffee" by default.

The "check-square" icon is getting a default prefix of fas here too, which is what we want, because that icon also lives in the @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid package.

However, the "apple", "microsoft", and "google" brand icons live in the package @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands. So we need to specify a different prefix for them—not the default fas, but fab, for Font Awesome Brand.

When specifying a prefix with an icon name, both are given as strings.

Now, what about that syntax?

The icon prop expects a single object:

• It could be an icon object, like {faCoffee}.

• It could a string object, like "coffee".

  (The curly braces around a string object supplied to a prop are optional, so we've omitted them.)

• Or it could be an Array of strings, where the first element is a prefix, and the second element is the icon name: {["fab", "apple"]}

There are some scenarios where you may want your React components to reference icons that have already been loaded globally with a <script> tag.

For example: a web site that is not a Single Page App. Maybe it involves a theme or template that makes use of Font Awesome icons by sourcing them in via <script> tag. Now you come along to add one or more React components to that web site. Instead of explicitly importing icons again into your components, you could reference the icons that have already been externally loaded.

Suppose your React component is mounted in a DOM that has the following in its <head>:

 <script src="https://example.com/fontawesome-free-solid.js"></script>

Now you can reference any of the icons from within your React components as if you'd added them to the library:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="coffee"/>

In the following code snippets, we'll use the shortcut notation for the icons—referencing the icons by their names as strings.

But remember, that option is only valid after you've either explicitly imported and added those icons to the library, or externally loaded an icon bundle. See the sections above for the details.

Spin and pulse animation:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" spin />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" pulse />

Fixed width:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" fixedWidth />

Border:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" border />

List items:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" listItem />

Flip horizontally, vertically, or both:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" flip="horizontal" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" flip="vertical" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" flip="both" />

Size:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" size="xs" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" size="lg" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" size="6x" />

Rotate:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" rotate={90} />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" rotate={180} />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" rotate={270} />

Pull left or right:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" pull="left" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" pull="right" />

Your own class names:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" className="highlight" />

Power Transforms:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" transform="shrink-6 left-4" />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="spinner" transform={{ rotate: 42 }} />

Composition:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="coffee" mask={['far', 'circle']} />

Symbols:

<FontAwesomeIcon icon="edit" symbol />
<FontAwesomeIcon icon="edit" symbol="edit-icon" />

Layering:

<span className="fa-layers fa-fw">
  <FontAwesomeIcon icon="square" color="green"/>
  <FontAwesomeIcon icon="check" inverse transform="shrink-6"/>
</span>