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Images & other assets easy

This section explains how to update your repository’s logo using the InvenioRDM theming system. Logos are part of the instance-level theme overrides, meaning your customization lives entirely inside your repository project and safely survives upgrades. It also teaches you how to manage assets like icons, background images or other types of assets.

Before proceeding, it’s important to understand how static and dynamic assets work in InvenioRDM.

Asset Types

Invenio distinguishes between two categories of assets:

Static assets

These are files served directly from the /static/ directory of your instance. They are not processed by a build pipeline. Examples:

  • SVGs and PNGs placed under myrepo/static/images/
  • Files referenced directly via a configuration variable (e.g., INVENIO_THEME_LOGO = "images/logo.svg")

Static assets:

  • Do not require asset rebuilding
  • Require a build step (e.g., ./run.sh cli assets build) only when you create them (for it to get linked into the output directory)
  • Are linked/copied as-is into the final static/ output directory of the application build
  • Are ideal for logos, favicons, and simple branding images

Dynamic assets

These are processed by the frontend build pipeline (Webpack or RSPack depending on your project). They usually include:

  • LESS/CSS stylesheets
  • JavaScript modules
  • Theme overrides compatible with Semantic UI or RDM UIs
  • Any other assets needing some kind of transformations (e.g., image optimization, minification)

Dynamic assets:

  • Require a build step (e.g., ./run.sh cli assets build) or running a development server with asset watcher
  • Aren’t served directly — a compiled output is served to clients by the application
  • Should be used when you need transformations, minification, or imports

Logos are typically static assets, referenced only by path from the theme configuration.

Provide a logo asset

Place your logo file (SVG or other vector format recommended) in your repository’s instance static assets directory:

cp my-logo.svg myrepo/static/images/invenio-rdm.svg"
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The recommended path is static/images/invenio-rdm.svg to align with InvenioRDM’s default logo location, as set by the configure_ui config helper. However, you can choose any path under the static/ directory as long as you reference it correctly in the configuration in the next step.
THEME_LOGO="images/my-logo.svg"
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The path is always relative to the static/ directory. So if your logo is at myrepo/static/images/my-logo.svg, you should set the config value to images/my-logo.svg.

Manage Dynamic Assets

For dynamic types of assets (e.g., fonts, icons, background images, or images used in LESS), you can place them in your repository’s instance-level assets directory — /assets.

Reference dynamic assets

You can reference dynamic assets in your LESS or JavaScript files using defined aliases:

  • ~@less/ - refers to the /assets/semantic-ui/less/ directory (commonly used in LESS files)
  • @js/ - refers to the /assets/semantic-ui/js/ directory (commonly used in JavaScript files)

You can see a detailed example of dynamic asset usage under the Fonts section.

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