An Inline SVG Component Using Vue & Laravel Mix

I wanted a Vue component that could pull any SVG from a file and inline it onto the page. View a gist of the full code here.

Jeffery Way and Caleb Porzio have already tackled this problem. However, their solutions wrapped the SVG output in a <div> tag. Extra elements like this feel gross to me, so I modified their work and came up with a solution that outputs clean SVGs instead.

The Webpack Config

First, Webpack needs to be configured to handle SVG paths with HTML Loader. By default Laravel Mix is configured to use File Loader, you can override this config with the code below:

mix.override(config => {
    config.module.rules.find(rule => rule.test.test('.svg')).exclude = /\.svg$/

    config.module.rules.push({
        test: /\.svg$/,
        use: [{ loader: 'html-loader' }],
    })
})

The Vue Component

The Vue component should accept an SVG file name as a prop and then output the SVG onto the page, like this:

<icon name="user" />

Here's the basic Vue component structure:

<template>
    <!-- <svg> element will eventually render here -->
</template>

<script>
export default {
    props: ['name'],
}
</script>

Next, we will pull the SVG file and transform it into a DOM Node. Using a DOM node we can work with our SVG more easily than trying to parse the raw SVG code as a string. I've added a created hook that will do this below:

<template>
    <!-- <svg> element will eventually render here -->
</template>

<script>
export default {
    props: ['name'],

    created() {
        const div = document.createElement('div')
        // Adjust the path below to point to your own SVG directory
        div.innerHTML = require('../../' + this.name + '.svg')

        const fragment = document.createDocumentFragment()
        fragment.appendChild(div)

        const svg = fragment.querySelector('svg')
    },
}
</script>

As soon as our Vue component is created, we create a <div> and set its innerHTML to the SVG file's HTML. Then we place the <div> inside of a document fragment and query for the SVG node inside. Building a document fragment in this way lets us use the Vue DOM API without having to actually insert any elements into our webpage's real DOM.

Finally, now that we have our svg node we can finish off the <template> code that will render the SVG onto the page.

<template>
    <svg v-bind="attributes" v-html="html"></svg>
</template>

<script>
export default {
    props: ['name'],

    data: () => ({
        attributes: {},
        html: '',
    }),

    created() {
        const div = document.createElement('div')
        div.innerHTML = require('../../' + this.name + '.svg')

        const fragment = document.createDocumentFragment()
        fragment.appendChild(div)

        const svg = fragment.querySelector('svg')

        const attributes = Array.from(svg.attributes).reduce((attrs, attr) => {
            attrs[attr.name] = attr.value

            return attrs
        }, {})

        this.attributes = Object.assign(attributes, this.$attrs)

        this.html = svg.innerHTML
    },
}
</script>

In the code above, we grab all of the SVG node's attributes and merge them with any attributes that might exist on our Vue component (contained in $attrs). Then we copy over the innerHTML from our SVG node and output in our Vue template using the v-html directive.

And we're done! Now we have a super flexible inline SVG component: Any attributes applied to the component will be inherited by the SVG.

<icon name="user" width="16px" height="16px" fill="red"></icon>