How can I add Font Awesome to my Aurelia project using npm?

I have been following the Contact Manager tutorial and would like to add Font Awesome to the project. Here's what I have done so far:

npm install Font-Awesome --save
Added the following to aurelia.jsonunder the dependencies array of the vendor-bundle.js:

...
{
    "name": "font-awesome",
    "path": "../node_modules/font-awesome",
    "resources": [
      "css/font-awesome.min.css"
    ]
},
...

But when running au run --watch I get the error:

error C:\Users\node_modules\font-awesome.js

Why is it looking for the .js file?

Solution

Don't add font-awesome resources to aurelia.json - you'd need font files too, which Aurelia don't process. Instead, take the following steps.

First, if you added anything for font-awesome already to your aurelia.json file, remove it again.

Add new file prepare-font-awesome.js in folder \aurelia_project\tasks and insert the below code. It copies font-awesome resource files to output folder (as configured aurelia.json config file; e.g. scripts):

import gulp from 'gulp';
import merge from 'merge-stream';
import changedInPlace from 'gulp-changed-in-place';
import project from '../aurelia.json';

export default function prepareFontAwesome() {
  const source = 'node_modules/font-awesome';

  const taskCss = gulp.src(`${source}/css/font-awesome.min.css`)
    .pipe(changedInPlace({ firstPass: true }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(`${project.platform.output}/css`));

  const taskFonts = gulp.src(`${source}/fonts/*`)
    .pipe(changedInPlace({ firstPass: true }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(`${project.platform.output}/fonts`));

  return merge(taskCss, taskFonts);
}

Open the build.js file in the \aurelia_project\tasks folder and insert the following two lines; this will import the new function and execute it:

import prepareFontAwesome from './prepare-font-awesome'; // Our custom task

export default gulp.series(
  readProjectConfiguration,
  gulp.parallel(
    transpile,
    processMarkup,
    processCSS,
    prepareFontAwesome // Our custom task
  ),
  writeBundles
);

Finally, in the <head> section of your index.html file, just add the following line:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="scripts/css/font-awesome.min.css">

That's all; now you can use font-awesome icons in any Aurelia view modules (html files).

Note that this works for any complex third party library which requires resources which you have to manually include.