Font Awesome and Symfony Encore for Web Development

Image source: Font Awesome website

As a web developer, you are most likely familiar with Font Awesome, a popular icon font toolkit that provides a huge collection of scalable vector icons that can be customized easily with CSS. You may also be familiar with Symfony Encore, an asset management tool for front-end development in Symfony projects. But have you ever thought about combining these two powerful tools to make your web development workflow even more efficient and streamlined?

What is Symfony Encore?

Symfony Encore is a powerful tool that simplifies the asset management process in Symfony applications. It is built on top of Webpack, a bundler for JavaScript and other front-end assets. With Symfony Encore, you can easily manage your CSS, JavaScript, and other assets using modern tools and techniques like ES2015, Sass, and CSS next.

Symfony Encore also provides several other useful features for front-end development, such as hot module reloading for faster development and smarter cache busting for more efficient builds.

What is Font Awesome?

Font Awesome is a popular icon font toolkit that has become an essential resource for web designers and developers. It provides a collection of scalable vector icons that can be customized easily with CSS. It is fully compatible with all modern web browsers, and can be used in any project, including web, mobile, and desktop applications.

Font Awesome provides a wide range of icons in various categories, such as transportation, food, technology, and more. Each icon is available in several styles, including solid, regular, and light.

Combining Symfony Encore and Font Awesome

Combining Symfony Encore and Font Awesome allows you to streamline your front-end development workflow even further. You can easily use Font Awesome icons in your Symfony Encore projects by importing the font-awesome library and including the CSS in your project.

To get started, install the Font Awesome and Symfony Encore packages using the following commands:

npm install --save-dev @fortawesome/fontawesome-free

yarn add --dev @symfony/webpack-encore

Then, create a new Encore instance in your webpack.config.js file, and import the Font Awesome CSS file:

const Encore = require('@symfony/webpack-encore');

Encore
    // ... other Encore configurations ...

    // Import Font Awesome CSS
    .addStyleEntry('font-awesome', './node_modules/@fortawesome/fontawesome-free/css/all.css')
    .enableSassLoader()
    .enablePostCssLoader();

module.exports = Encore.getWebpackConfig();

After this, you can use Font Awesome icons in your project like this:

<i class="fas fa-user"></i>

Conclusion

By combining Symfony Encore and Font Awesome, you can significantly improve your front-end development workflow. You can easily import Font Awesome icons in your Symfony Encore projects, and customize them using CSS. With hot module reloading and smarter cache busting, Symfony Encore helps you develop your front-end code faster and more efficiently.