Favicon Finder

Developed in 2020 | Just Me
Favicon Finder

Project Briefing

FaviconFinder is a small, pure Swift library designed for iOS and macOS applications that allows you to detect favicons used by a website.

Why not just download the file that exists at https://site.com/favicon.ico? There are multiple places that a developer can place their favicon, not just at the root directory with the specific filename of favicon.ico. The favicon’s address may be linked within the HTML header tags, or it may be within a web application manifest JSON file, or it could even be a file with a custom filename.

FaviconFinder handles the dirty work for you and iterates through the numerous possible favicon locations, and simply delivers the image to you in a closure, once the image is found.

FaviconFinder will:

  • Detect the favicon in the root directory of the URL provided.
  • Automatically check if the favicon is located within the root URL if the subdomain failed (Will check https://site.com/favicon.ico if https://subdomain.site.com/favicon.ico fails).
  • Detect and parse the HTML at the URL for the declaration of the favicon.
  • Resolve the favicon URL for you, even if it’s a relative URL to the subdomain that you’re querying.
  • Allow you to prioritise which format of favicon you would like served.
  • Detect and parse web application manifest JSON files for favicon locations.
  • If you set checkForMetaRefreshRedirect to true, FaviconFinder will analyse the HTML for a meta refresh redirect tag. If such a tag is found, the URL in the tag is the URL that will be queried.


Technical Details

  • FaviconFinder uses Swift 5, and runs for the iOS, macOS, and Linux platforms.
  • The FaviconFinder project uses the MIT licence, and is hosted on Github.
  • FaviconFinder supports CocoaPods, Carthage and Swift Package Manager.
  • FaviconFinder uses unit tests in conjunction with Github Actions to ensure consistent code quality is maintained.