svgshelf

A simple CLI for merging multiple svg into a single file, for nodejs/iojs.

Motivation

We use npm run build as our build tool, and since svgo already does the hard work of optimizing our svg files, this is a command line tool to help us with the last step: bundling svg into a single file, so you can reference it as a cachable external file, through svg use().

Much of the idea here is based on grunt-svgstore and gulp-svgstore, which are perfectly fine if you use grunt/gulp, but if all you need is a simple CLI, svgshelf got your covered.

Install

npm install svgshelf --save-dev or npm install svgshelf -g

Usage

As a command, escape * to prevent bash glob expansion

svgshelf svg/input/\*.svg svg/output/result.svg

As a npm build tool, escape \ since we are in a string

{
	"scripts": {
		"build": "svgo -f svg/input/ && svgshelf svg/input/\\*.svg svg/output/result.svg"
	}
}

Additional arguments

All options are disabled by default.

• -d output a demo html alongaside of result svg
• -b format and beautify output svg
• -p prefix add a prefix to each svg icon, so if it was result.svg#button, it would be result.svg#prefixbutton

Current limits

• For node.js, you need v0.11+ for this module to work properly, and so far both v0.11 and v0.12 require you to set node --harmony flag to work with generator, and yes, it's a pain.
• For complex svg that make use of url() linking, merging them may break url reference. We don't expect this to be a problem for svg icons.
• We may support more types of svg merging (or stacking) in future, but <use> with a polyfil like svg4everybody appear to give better coverage (on desktop and mobile).

License

MIT