Changing footer icons#

Furo allows customising the icons that are presented in the page footer. These icons can be used to link to relevant resources for your project and documentation.

Unstable, seeking feedback

This feature is treated as “unstable” under Furo’s Stability Policy.

It currently needs input from documentation authors, about how useful and usable this is and how “ergonomic” it is.

Default icons#

Furo includes two default icons, when the documentation is built on Read the Docs:

A link to the Read the Docs project page, for the documentation.
A link to the GitHub repository, if configured as a GitHub project on RTD.

If the documentation is not built on Read the Docs, there are no icons included by default.

Configuration#

To add custom footer icons, you need to provide the footer_icons configuration value to Furo. If this configuration value is non-empty, the default footer icons are disabled.

The value for this configuration value is a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary needs to have the following structure:

name: Describes what the destination location is. This is primarily for screen readers.
url: Where clicking on the icon will take users.
html: The exact raw HTML that is included as the “icon”.
class: This is included as-is in the class attribute of the a tag.

Using embedded SVGs#

This is what Furo does to include a GitHub icon in the footer of the site you’re currently reading:

html_theme_options = {
    "footer_icons": [
        {
            "name": "GitHub",
            "url": "https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo",
            "html": """
                <svg stroke="currentColor" fill="currentColor" stroke-width="0" viewBox="0 0 16 16">
                    <path fill-rule="evenodd" d="M8 0C3.58 0 0 3.58 0 8c0 3.54 2.29 6.53 5.47 7.59.4.07.55-.17.55-.38 0-.19-.01-.82-.01-1.49-2.01.37-2.53-.49-2.69-.94-.09-.23-.48-.94-.82-1.13-.28-.15-.68-.52-.01-.53.63-.01 1.08.58 1.23.82.72 1.21 1.87.87 2.33.66.07-.52.28-.87.51-1.07-1.78-.2-3.64-.89-3.64-3.95 0-.87.31-1.59.82-2.15-.08-.2-.36-1.02.08-2.12 0 0 .67-.21 2.2.82.64-.18 1.32-.27 2-.27.68 0 1.36.09 2 .27 1.53-1.04 2.2-.82 2.2-.82.44 1.1.16 1.92.08 2.12.51.56.82 1.27.82 2.15 0 3.07-1.87 3.75-3.65 3.95.29.25.54.73.54 1.48 0 1.07-.01 1.93-.01 2.2 0 .21.15.46.55.38A8.013 8.013 0 0 0 16 8c0-4.42-3.58-8-8-8z"></path>
                </svg>
            """,
            "class": "",
        },
    ],
}

Since html is expected to be static HTML, you can not use relative paths to images included in the Sphinx documentation set, at least not without resorting to ugly hacks.[1] Instead, it is recommended to either embed the image directly (eg: in an svg tag), or to link to images “outside” of the documentation.

It is generally preferable to use SVG images, that respect currentColor. A decently large set of common SVG-based icons can be found on: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/[2].

Using icon packs#

You can use icon packs that provide icons, with the footer. Usually, icons pack have a non-negligible impact on first page load times and need more data needing to be downloaded. That said, you also get more convenient access to a well designed set of icons. :)

Font Awesome#

Note

With the release of Font Awesome 6, Fonticons Inc has revamped the documentation to consistently upsell their Kits. These kits can help reduce load times on pages but have limited number of page views, so we’ll use Font Awesome via a CDN in this example.

If you wish to use Font Awesome icons in the footer, it’s a two step process.

Using html_css_files, add the CSS file(s) for Font Awesome.

html_css_files = [
      "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.0.0/css/fontawesome.min.css",
      "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.0.0/css/solid.min.css",
      "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.0.0/css/brands.min.css",
]

Use class to use the relevant Font Awesome icons in footer_icons. You can search the free Font Awesome icons, and clicking on a specific icon shows the class you need to use. The configuration would look as follows:

html_theme_options = {
    "footer_icons": [
        {
            "name": "GitHub",
            "url": "https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo",
            "html": "",
            "class": "fa-solid fa-github fa-2x",
        },
    ],
}

Note that the fa-2x is necessary to get a reasonable sized icon.

Different icons for light mode vs dark mode#

You can specify only-light or only-dark as the value for class in the dictionary. This mechanism exists primarily to help you use different img tags to present the same icon in a different colour.