I recently transitioned this blog to self-host its fonts (IBM Plex Sans, Sans KR, and Mono) from within the GitHub Pages artifact instead of calling the Google Fonts API. This makes the site a little more “static” by eliminating the need for your browser to download font files from an external domain. Here, I explain how (and why) I self-host fonts without bringing them into the source tree.

The easiest way to self-host fonts with a static site generator like Jekyll is to store the .ttf or .woff2 font files and their CSS inside of the assets/ folder of the source repo. But this turns the font into an in-tree dependency, which I wanted to avoid: Although IBM’s SIL Open Font License appears to permit this sort of vendoring, I have an (admittedly puristic) desire for my repo to consist only of code I wrote myself. And I wanted to try automating the process of downloading and installing a dependency without using a package manager like conda or apt.1

My source repo already has a configure.sh script that installs Ruby, Jekyll and so on to the local workstation so that it can build and preview the static site. To this script, I added curl and unzip commands to automatically download the latest IBM Plex release and extract the fonts to the assets/ directory (where they are .gitignored).

Now, as long as IBM follows semantic versioning in its font releases, updating to a new version of IBM Plex requires no more than changing the version number in these lines from configure.sh:

IBM_PLEX_MONO_SRC="https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases/download/%40ibm%2Fplex-mono%401.1.0/ibm-plex-mono.zip"
IBM_PLEX_SANS_SRC="https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases/download/%40ibm%2Fplex-sans%401.1.0/ibm-plex-sans.zip"
IBM_PLEX_SANS_KR_SRC="https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases/download/%40ibm%2Fplex-sans-kr%401.1.0/ibm-plex-sans-kr.zip"

(It is also possible to modify these URLs to automatically pull the latest release instead of pinning a version.)

  1. I already use conda as part of my configure.sh script, so installing a font with conda wouldn’t be a heavy lift, but only the Sans variant of IBM Plex is available in conda-forge, and I need the KR and Mono variants, too. (The conda package also doesn’t include CSS font definitions.)

    These fonts are available in the Ubuntu apt repositories, but then my build script would no longer function on other Linux distros, and I’d still have to use ./configure.sh to copy the files from /usr/share/ to my site’s assets/ directory. ↩