Bootstrap 3 Glyphicons CDN

Question

PAY ATTENTION!

The Bootstrap icons are back after this pull request merge.

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After going back and forth on this for the last couple weeks, I've decided to restore the Glyphicons icon font to the main repo. Given how prevalent icons are in UIs, it's probably a disservice to most folks to not include them (or some other icon font) in the same spot as the CSS and JS.

With this update comes the following:

• Restores documentation (on the Components page)
• New variables, @icon-font-path and @icon-font-name, for flexibility in adding and removing icon fonts
• Upgrades to latest Glyphicons (adding 40 new icons)
• Removes the old Glyphicons mention from the CSS page

We'll work on improving the customization of icon fonts in the future so swapping font libraries can be easier (which was the whole motivation for the original removal).

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Which is the CDN url of the new version of Twitter Bootstrap Glyphicons?

From the Bootstrap 3 they were moved into a separate repository, but I didn't find any CDN.

From the official documentation:

With the launch of Bootstrap 3, icons have been moved to a separate repository. This keeps the primary project as lean as possible, makes it easier for folks to swap icon libraries, and makes Glyphicons icon fonts more readily available to more people outside Bootstrap.

On the official website they don't provide a CDN url for icons.

Where can find it? I don't want to download the repository and include it into my project.

Answer 1

With the recent release of bootstrap 3, and the glyphicons being merged back to the main Bootstrap repo, Bootstrap CDN is now serving the complete Bootstrap 3.0 css including Glyphicons. The Bootstrap css reference is all you need to include: Glyphicons and its dependencies are on relative paths on the CDN site and are referenced in bootstrap.min.css.

In html:

<link href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> 

In css:

 @import url("//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap.min.css"); 

Here is a working demo.

Note that you have to use .glyphicon classes instead of .icon:

Example:

<span class="glyphicon glyphicon-heart"></span> 

Also note that you would still need to include bootstrap.min.js for usage of Bootstrap JavaScript components, see Bootstrap CDN for url.

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If you want to use the Glyphicons separately, you can do that by directly referencing the Glyphicons css on Bootstrap CDN.

In html:

<link href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap-glyphicons.css" rel="stylesheet"> 

In css:

@import url("//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap-glyphicons.css"); 

Since the css file already includes all the needed Glyphicons dependencies (which are in a relative path on the Bootstrap CDN site), adding the css file is all there is to do to start using Glyphicons.

Here is a working demo of the Glyphicons without Bootstrap.

Answer 2

An alternative would be to use Font-Awesome for icons:

Including Font-Awesome

Open Font-Awesome on CDNJS and copy the CSS url of the latest version:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<url>"> 

Or in CSS

@import url("<url>"); 

For example (note, the version will change):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.7.0/css/font-awesome.css"> 

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Usage:

<i class="fa fa-bed"></i> 

It contains a lot of icons!