By the end of this you can have Font Awesome icons available site-wide from a single dropdown, with no extra module and no library download.
One select, five choices
Go to Libraries & Fonts → Font Libraries and find Select Font Awesome Library. The options are exactly these, and they are worth reading carefully because they are not all the same kind of thing:
- None — nothing is loaded.
- Load Font Awesome 4.7 locally — served from inside the theme.
- Load Font Awesome 4.7 from the CDN.
- Load Font Awesome 5.15.4 from the CDN.
- Load Font Awesome 6.5.1 from the CDN.
Local or CDN
The local option is the only one that makes no third-party request: the stylesheet and webfonts ship with Solo. That matters for privacy rules, for sites behind a firewall, and for anyone running a strict Content-Security-Policy, since a CDN choice means allowing an external host for both styles and fonts. The trade-off is version: local is 4.7, so the newer icon sets and the brand-icon split introduced in version 5 are CDN-only. Versions 5 and 6 are attached with defer, so they do not block rendering.
Using the icons once they load
Nothing else in the theme changes — you now simply have the icon classes available wherever markup is rendered: block bodies, menu link titles that allow HTML, node content, and your own Twig templates. Pick the class names from the Font Awesome documentation for the version you selected, because the naming changed between 4 and 5.
A word on weight: an icon library is one of the heaviest optional assets on a small site, so if you only need two or three glyphs, an inline SVG will beat all five options here. Solo itself already renders its menu, search and arrow icons as inline SVG partials. If you are weighing up what to switch on, this piece on Solo's flexibility puts the optional libraries in context.
Solo runs on ^10.1 || ^11 || ^12 with PHP ^8.1 — theme details.
Want a Drupal theme built or customised around your brand rather than configured by hand? See Drupal theming services, or request a quote.
