Avris

Four years ago I backed Font Awesome 5 on Kickstarter, and in return I received a license to use it and to access the pro features. The license might be perpetual, but the pro features, sadly, are not

If you don't subscribe to a Pro plan, you won't be able to install Font Awesome Pro using npm or yarn.

That's the one feature I need! And on August 1^st it will be gone! My dev setup, my deployment setup, of multiple projects, everything depends on fetching Font Awesome from the npm registry.

Luckily, there's a simple way around it

I'm allowed by the license to download the project and create backups, but obviously not to share it with others – so it's all done in a private repository.

First, I fetched the latest version of the project:

yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome-pro

Then, I just went to node_modules/@fortawesome/fontawesome-pro, initialised a fresh git repository there and pushed it to gitlab.com/Avris/FontAwesomePro.

Now, whenever I want to use FontAwesome 5 in a project, I just go:

yarn add git+ssh://git@gitlab.com:Avris/FontAwesomePro.git

And that's it!

I was surprised that it's so simple. Of course my repository won't get automatically updated with the project, but since version 5 won't be developed anymore, it doesn't matter at all. And it works like a charm!