react-native-svg-asset-plugin

Allows you to use SVG images directly in React Native and Expo, similarly to how you would use PNG files. This is useful for projects working with SVG icons, and don't want to manually keep generating PNG versions of them.

📱 If you also want to use SVG images for your application launcher icons, you might want to check out react-native-svg-app-icon.

Quick start

1. Install

   npm install -D react-native-svg-asset-plugin

2. Add metro config

   // metro.config.js
   config.transformer.assetPlugins.push("react-native-svg-asset-plugin");

3. Import images

   // Logo.jsx
   import { Image, View } from "react-native";
   
   const Logo = () =>
     <View>
       <Image source={require('./icons/logo.svg')} />
     </View>

Comparison

Instead of rendering SVG images while running the app, like react-native-svg and expo-image, react-native-svg-asset-plugin produces PNG files during app build time which are then bundled with the application.

This makes react-native-svg-asset-plugin useful for occasional smaller UI icons, as it doesn't require bundling a complete SVG rendering engine in the app. On the other hand react-native-svg and expo-image are more useful when you have a lot of larger images, or need to load SVG images dynamically at runtime.

	react-native-svg	expo-image	react-native-svg-asset-plugin
Rendering	Runtime	Runtime	Build time
Runtime dependencies	JS + Native	JS + Native	None
Dependency size	Larger	Larger	None
Image size	Smaller	Smaller	Larger
Works with <Image>	No	Partially	Yes
Remote assets	Yes	Yes	No
Modifiable	Yes	No	No
Suitable for	Many / external images	Expo SDK projects	UI icons

Installation

npm

npm install --save-dev react-native-svg-asset-plugin

No dependencies outside of NPM. Uses sharp for SVG rasterization.

metro

To enable the asset plugin you will need to include it in the metro bundler configuration.

Expo

For expo projects you will first need to enable customization of the metro config:

npx expo customize metro.config.js

Then, in the metro.config.js file, add "react-native-svg-asset-plugin" to the transformer asset plugins like this:

// Learn more https://docs.expo.io/guides/customizing-metro
const { getDefaultConfig } = require("expo/metro-config");

/** @type {import('expo/metro-config').MetroConfig} */
const config = getDefaultConfig(__dirname);

config.transformer.assetPlugins.push("react-native-svg-asset-plugin");

module.exports = config;

React Native

Add 'react-native-svg-asset-plugin' to the list of assetPlugins in your metro.config.js file under the transformer section.

For example;

const { getDefaultConfig, mergeConfig } = require('@react-native/metro-config');

/**
 * Metro configuration
 * https://reactnative.dev/docs/metro
 *
 * @type {import('@react-native/metro-config').MetroConfig}
 */
const config = {
  transformer: {
    assetPlugins: ['react-native-svg-asset-plugin'],
  },
};

module.exports = mergeConfig(getDefaultConfig(__dirname), config);

git

Add .png-cache to your .gitignore file so that the generated files won't be added to your repository.

Usage

Require your SVG files directly into React Native Image or ImageBackground components. For example:

import { Image, View } from "react-native";

const Logo = () =>
  <View>
    <Image source={require('./icons/logo.svg')} />
  </View>

While most valid SVG files are supported, for best results include width and height properties for the <svg> element to ensure that the PNG images are reasonably sized. Additionally, you'll want to avoid <text> elements that might produce different results based on what fonts are installed. For complete information about supported SVG features, see the librsvg documentation.

Scaled PNGs will be generated under the .png-cache symlink alongside the SVG files. The asset plugin then directs React Native to load the PNG files instead of the SVG.

- icons/
  - .png-cache/ (symlink to temp cache storage)
    - logo-<hash>@1x.png
    - logo-<hash>@2x.png
    - logo-<hash>@3x.png
  - logo.svg

Configuration

You can configure the plugin behaviour through the optional svgAssetPlugin field in your metro.config.js file under the transformer section.

For example;

module.exports = {
  transformer: {
    // ...
    assetPlugins: ['react-native-svg-asset-plugin'],
    svgAssetPlugin: {
      pngCacheDir: '.png-cache',
      scales: [1, 2, 3],
      output: {
        compressionLevel: 9,
      },
    },
  },
};

Where the possible configuration values are:

Field	Type	Default	Description
cacheDir	string	'.png-cache'	Name of symlink that will point to cacheStorageDir.
cacheStorageDir	string	OS temp	Absolute path where generated PNGs are stored. Defaults to OS temp directory.
scales	number[]	[1, 2, 3]	PNG image scales to generate for different screen densities.
output	object	{}	Sharp PNG output options.
ignoreRegex	RegExp	null	Regex that will be matched against the source file's full path, if there's a match the file will be ignored.

You will need to reset the bundler cache with react-native start --reset-cache for configuration changes to take effect for already generated images.

Troubleshooting

Asset not found

Error: Asset not found: /Users/user/StickerSmash/assets/.png-cache/icon-423334598dc20172915d59bd4b95d059@3x.png for platform: ios

In case the metro and plugin image caches are out of sync, the metro bundler may try to load images that aren't available anymore in the generated image cache. In this case you'll need to reset the metro cache to regenerate the images.

In case this happens frequently, you might want to create an issue about it in this repository.

Technical details

The plugin works by intercepting loaded SVG assets, and transforming them to PNGs before they are loaded by the metro transformer. After being loaded by the transformer, they work as any other PNG file in React Native, meaning you can use and style them freely in Image components.

Each SVG file produces three PNG files in 1x, 2x and 3x scales. The size of the PNG images are defined by the width and height attributes of the SVG images.

SVGs are rasterized to PNGs using the sharp Node.js library, which is based on libvips C library, which includes the librsvg library that renders the SVG images.

The generated assets need to be accessible from within the project directory in order to be served by the development server. Due to this we need to provide a symlink to the real temporary cache storage directory.