Our second alpha release of v5.3.0 has landed with a ton of enhancements and bug fixes for our new color modes! There’s still more to come, but we’ve held off shipping until we ironed out enough issues. Huzzah, we have!
This v5.3.0 release is a monumental update for Bootstrap 5. It’s big enough that it could’ve been a v6 on its own, but we wanted to do right by the community and get color modes out the door without the massive major release upgrade. We’re getting super close now, so bear with us as we continue to chip away at this.
Removed several duplicate and unused root CSS variables.
Color modes
Dark mode colors are now derived from our theme colors (e.g., $primary) in Sass, rather than color-specific tints or shades (e.g., $blue-300). This allows for a more automated dark mode when customizing the default theme colors.
Added Sass maps for generating theme colors for dark mode text, subtle background, and subtle border.
Snippet examples are now ready for dark mode with updated markup and reduced custom styles.
Added color-scheme: dark to dark mode CSS to change OS level controls like scrollbars
Form validation border-color and text color states now respond to dark mode, thanks to new Sass and CSS variables.
Dropped recently added form control background CSS variables and reassigned the Sass variables to use CSS variables instead. This simplifies the styling across color modes and avoids an issue where form controls in dark mode wouldn’t update properly.
Our box-shadows will once again always stay dark instead of inverting to white when in dark mode.
Improved HTML and JavaScript for our color mode toggle script. The selector for changing the active SVG has been improved, and the markup made more accessible with ARIA attributes.
Improved docs code syntax colors and more across light and dark modes.
Removed the ability to nest light mode components within dark mode. This was super incomplete unfortunately and just isn’t practical without quadrupling our selectors for every component. Maybe in v6!
Typography
We no longer set a color for $headings-color-dark or --bs-heading-color for dark mode. To avoid several problems of headings within components appearing the wrong color, we’ve set the Sass variable to null and added a null check like we use on the default light mode.
Components
Cards now have a color set on them to improve rendering across color modes.
Added a new .nav-underline variant for our navigation with a simpler bottom border under the active nav link. See the docs for an example.
Navs now have new :focus-visible styles that better match our custom button focus styles.
Helpers
Added a new .icon-link helper to quickly place and align Bootstrap Icons alongside a textual link. Icon links support our new link utilities, too.
Added a new focus ring helper for removing the default outline and setting a custom box-shadow focus ring.
Utilities
Renamed Sass and CSS variables ${color}-text to ${color}-text-emphasis to match their associated utilities.
Added new .link-body-emphasis helper alongside our colored links. This creates a colored link using our color mode responsive emphasis color.
Added new link utilities for link color opacity, underline offset, underline color, and underline opacity. Explore the new links utilities.
CSS variable-based border-width utilities have been reverted to set their property directly (as was done before v5.2.0). This avoids inheritance issues across nested elements, including tables.
Added new .border-black utility to match our .text-black and .bg-black utilities.
Deprecated Deprecated the .text-muted utility and $text-muted Sass variable. It’s been replaced by .text-body-secondary and $body-secondary-color.
Docs
Updated docs page table of contents to use Scrollspy (shoutout to our v3 docs!).
Revamped syntax highlighting colors for code snippets across color modes.
Improved content and rendering of several docs callouts.
Document more color mode features and usage suggestions.
Added theme toggling to examples pages.
Updated dependencies across the board, including in our guides.
Known issues
While not an exhaustive list, here’s some of the stuff we’re going to be working on before calling this release stable. You can track these and more in the v5.3.0-stable project on GitHub.
Add new functionality to utilities with mixins and functions.
Some components need another pass at enabling full-color mode responsiveness. Bear in mind, some components like buttons won’t get full-color mode adaptivity until v6.
Labels in disabled floating forms have incorrect rendering.
Docs need to be updated for modifying theme colors across color modes.
Examples need another pass for dark mode support, new screenshots, and more.
Improve click/tap area for range inputs.
Up next will be the stable release of v5.3.0. Originally this was planned as a beta, but I think we’re getting close enough to call this final with one more release.
It’s a Christmas miracle—Bootstrap v5.3.0-alpha1 has arrived just in time for the holiday break! This release brings new color mode support, an expanded color palette with variables and utilities, and more.
We’re keeping things short and simple in this blog post with deeper dives into the new color modes and more coming in future posts. For now, we want you to enjoy the holiday break and come back next year feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Keep reading for what’s new and we’ll see you next year!
Dark mode and color modes
Bootstrap now supports an explicit opt-in for creating multiple color modes via the data-bs-theme attribute on the root <html> element. We opted for a data attribute solution so that you can create any number of themes instead of just light and dark. We use a new Sass mixin, color-mode(), to generate our dark mode styles with either a data attribute (the default) or a media query. The latter is useful if you only have two color modes and want automatic color mode changing via CSS.
For those wanting to build something more advanced, you can read how we built our own color mode picker with JavaScript that respects the device or operating system setting by default, but still allows someone to override it with an explicit theme.
If you’re using the CDN or starter template, using the new color modes is straightforward. Add the data-bs-theme attribute with light or dark values to the <html> element and you’ll be using either the light or dark theme.
Want to use CSS media queries to change the color mode instead? You can also build Bootstrap with Sass and customize how you use color modes. Read the docs to learn more. You can even create custom color modes.
Expanded color palette
We have a huge new color palette update with new Sass variables, CSS variables, and utilities to boot. Foreground and background colors have new secondary, tertiary, and emphasis colors to choose from, while our theme colors have expanded on to include their subtle background colors, subtle border colors, and darker text colors. We’ve rebuilt some components (like list groups and alerts) to use these new variables in their source Sass and compiled CSS so that they respond to the color mode changes.
Added new CSS variables for grid breakpoints, link colors, close button, alert links, forms, and more. In addition, many components have been updated to use more global CSS variables like --bs-border-color to better respond to changing color modes.
Floating forms have been updated to be more bulletproof and now include proper support for textareas.
Added many new utilities, including fw-medium, overflow and object-fit utilities, z-index, and more. Plus, border-radius utilities have been updated so that you can combine .rounded-{top|bottom|start|end} with .rounded-{0-5|pill|circle}.
Fixed some Popper tooltip and popover consistency issues.
As we iron out the release with your feedback and bug reports, we’ll also be updating the Bootstrap Blog and Bootstrap Icons sites to use the new themes soon. We’ll also continue to refine how our components and utilities work with the new color modes, adding Sass testing to improve our coverage of how folks build with Bootstrap, and much more.
Bootstrap Icons v1.10.0 is here with nearly 150 new icons. This release includes tons of new variants for person, building, and database icons, plus new brands, rockets, road signs, globes, and many more. We’re now at over 1,900 icons!
150 new icons
Here’s a quick look at all the new icons in v1.10.0:
Some highlights for the new icons include:
22 new person icons
26 new house icons
24 new building icons, including a renamed building to buildings
22 new database icons
24 new street sign icons
New globe icons
New EV, taxi, bus, and scooter transportation icons
New rockets
and more!
We also fixed the fill rules for several some issues across the docs, including:
De-duped category names Brand and Brands to be just Brand
Updated tags on several icon pages for additional aliases
Looking for more new icons? Head to the issue tracker to check for open requests or submit a new one.
The Figma file is now published to the Figma Community! It’s the same Bootstrap Icons Figma file you’ve seen from previous releases, just a little more accessible to those using the app.
Bootstrap v5.2.1 is here with fixes from our latest minor release, v5.2. As a patch release, these changes are limited to bug fixes, documentation updates, and some dependency updates.
We’ve also continued to iterate on a few other projects to help folks get up and running with Bootstrap with npm, other JS frameworks, and various build tools. Keep reading to learn more.
Key changes
We’ve updated our calc() functions to work around an apparent bug in postcss-values-parser that prevented our source Sass files from compiling properly when building with React and PostCSS. The fix was to reverse the order of our multiplication inside calc() functions. Be aware you may need to make similar modifications depending on your own customizations.
We’ve also addressed some longstanding issues around button focus and active styling, in particular for checkbox and radio buttons. On mobile devices, input-based buttons have trouble shedding their focus styles. This has been resolved in v5.2.1 with a change from :focus to :focus-visible for our .btns. Now, checkbox and radio buttons no longer change their background-color on :focus-visible and they receive no :hover styling. Regular .btns still have their familiar hover and focus styles.
We debated not including the button focus change in v5.2.1, but felt it was important enough to close several bugs. Let us know what you think and we’ll continue to refine our implementation.
Highlights
In addition to the changes above, we’ve fixed bugs across several components:
Accordion
Update color value to use the $accordion-button-color Sass variable instead of our color contrast function
Buttons
Added a transparent default hover border color CSS variable for buttons to fix a visual regression
.btn-link no longer has a gradient when $enable-gradients is set to true
Forms
Input groups have updated z-index values to ensure proper rendering of validated form fields
Floating labels now reset their text-align to ensure consistent styling
List Groups
Horizontal list groups with only one child now render the correct border-radius
Modified the list-group-item selectors to better support nested imports of Bootstrap’s CSS
Modals
Updated event listeners to ignore clicks on scrollbar clicks, clicks that start inside .modal-dialog but end outside it, and respond to clicks that start and end outside .modal-dialog
Reverted some tooltip plugin updates to prevent issues with selector, dynamic content, and disposed tooltips using title
Fixed trigger: "manual" showing and immediately hiding when calling toggle()
Dependencies
Updated Autoprefixer to fix warnings of the color-adjust property (thanks to @julien-deramond on our team for reporting an issue upstream here)
Docs
Searching our docs on mobile has been improved with the search field now always visible on responsive, narrow viewports
Removed links to and mentions of Slack from across the codebase, as we intend to shutter Slack in favor of GitHub Discussions
Reintroduced proper outline styles for docs code samples and buttons when :not(:focus-visible)
Farewell, Slack!
As mentioned over a month ago, we made the decision to close down our community Slack channel. Slack isn’t great at managing a large scale community and it’s prohibitively expensive as well for a community the size of ours (the Slack was over 45,000 people!). Instead of using Slack or similar tool, we’re encouraging folks to use our Discussions tab on GitHub.
Make sure to checkout (pun intended!) our latest project, the twbs/examples repository! The examples project includes functional demos for all sorts of environments and JS frameworks, with more planned! You can even open every example in StackBlitz and edit them in the browser.
Bootstrap Icons font - Import and compile Sass, Stylelint, PurgeCSS, and our icon font
Have an idea for a new starter example? Feel free to open an issue or pull request!
v4 starter project
We’ve shipped a v2.0.0 update to the twbs/bootstrap-npm-starter project. This release includes Bootstrap v4.6.2, Bootstrap Icons v1.9.1, a new live reload feature for local development, and several dependency updates. This project will remain dedicated to Bootstrap 4 while our twbs/examples repo will focus on v5 and future major releases.
Bootstrap v5.2.0 is finally stable! We’ve ironed out more bugs, improved more documentation, written new guides and built out new functional environment examples, and so much more!
Keep reading for highlights from both beta and stable releases.
Docs redesign
As previewed in our beta release, the docs have been redesigned! It starts with our new homepage where we have a more complete representation of Bootstrap’s features and an updated design.
The docs sidebar navigation has been overhauled to have always expanded groups for easier browsing, a brand new DocSearch experience with search history, and new responsive offcanvas drawers for both sidebar and navbar on mobile.
We even updated our version picker in the navbar to cross-link between minor releases!
Updated buttons and inputs
With our docs redesign, we refreshed buttons and inputs with modified padding and border-radius. Here’s a look at the before and after of our buttons:
Tons of new CSS variables
Nearly all our components now have CSS variables for real real-time customization, easier theming, and (soon) color mode support starting with dark mode. You can see what CSS variables are available on every docs page, like our buttons:
Values for virtually every CSS variables are assigned via Sass variable, so customization via CSS and Sass are both well supported. Also included for several components are examples of customizing via CSS variables.
New _maps.scss
Bootstrap v5.2.0 introduced a new Sass file with _maps.scss that pulls out several Sass maps from _variables.scss to fix an issue where updates to an original map were not applied to secondary maps that extend it. It’s not ideal, but it resolves a longstanding issue for folks when working with customized maps.
For example, updates to $theme-colors were not being applied to other maps that relied on $theme-colors (like the $utilities-colors and more), which created broken customization workflows. To summarize the problem, Sass has a limitation where once a default variable or map has been used, it cannot be updated. There’s a similar shortcoming with CSS variables when they’re used to compose other CSS variables.
This is also why variable customizations in Bootstrap have to come after @import "functions";, but before @import "variables"; and the rest of our import stack. The same applies to Sass maps—you must override the defaults before they get used. The following maps have been moved to the new _maps.scss:
$theme-colors-rgb
$utilities-colors
$utilities-text
$utilities-text-colors
$utilities-bg
$utilities-bg-colors
$negative-spacers
$gutters
Your custom Bootstrap CSS builds should now look like this with a separate maps import.
// Functions come first
@import "functions";
// Optional variable overrides here
+ $custom-color: #df711b;
+ $custom-theme-colors: (
+ "custom": $custom-color
+ );
// Variables come next
@import "variables";
+ // Optional Sass map overrides here
+ $theme-colors: map-merge($theme-colors, $custom-theme-colors);
+
+ // Followed by our default maps
+ @import "maps";
+
// Rest of our imports
@import "mixins";
@import "utilities";
@import "root";
@import "reboot";
// etc
New helpers and utilities
We’ve updated our helpers and utilities to make it easier to quickly build and modify custom components:
Added new .text-bg-{color} helpers. Instead of setting individual .text-* and .bg-* utilities, you can now use the .text-bg-* helpers to set a background-color with contrasting foreground color.
Expanded border-radius utilities to include two new sizes, .rounded-4 and .rounded-5, for more options.
Expect more improvements here as v5’s development continues.
Responsive offcanvas
Our Offcanvas component now has responsive variations. The original .offcanvas class remains unchanged—it hides content across all viewports. To make it responsive, change that .offcanvas class to any .offcanvas-{sm|md|lg|xl|xxl} class.
In addition, we’ve turned every one of those guides into a fully functioning example in our new twbs/examples repo. We’ve even added a couple more examples to the repo, with plans to create even more.
Each guide matches up to a new example in that repo, and nearly all of them can be immediately available in StackBlitz. Now you don’t even need to have a development environment configured on your computer to get started with Bootstrap.
And did we mention that nearly all our code snippets now have an open in StackBlitz button?
And more!
Introduced new $enable-container-classes option. — Now when opting into the experimental CSS Grid layout, .container-* classes will still be compiled, unless this option is set to false. Containers also now keep their gutter values.
Thicker table dividers are now opt-in. — We’ve removed the thicker and more difficult to override border between table groups and moved it to an optional class you can apply, .table-group-divider. See the table docs for an example.
Scrollspy has been rewritten to use the Intersection Observer API, which means you no longer need relative parent wrappers, deprecates offset config, and more. Look for your Scrollspy implementations to be more accurate and consistent in their nav highlighting.
Added .form-check-reverse modifier to flip the order of labels and associated checkboxes/radios.
Added striped columns support to tables via the new .table-striped-columns class.
After several months, we’ve finally shipped Bootstrap v4.6.2, one of our last releases for the v4. It’s a bit of a maintenance patch featuring bug fixes, dependency updates, and some docs updates.
First, we’ve added an example to our Collapse plugin docs to show how to use horizontal collapsing. This has long been possible via our JS, but we never had an official class to utilize it.
Second, we’ve replaced the deprecated color-adjust with print-color-adjust in our Sass files as part of the Autoprefixer v10.4.6 issues. This should quiet the issues folks have seen from that dependency change. If you’re using our distribution CSS files, like bootstrap.min.css, you may still see the warning.
Beyond that, we’ve addressed a few other things:
Tweaked the size of small and .small to compute to a whole pixel value (was 12.8px and now is 14px).
Improved accessibility around our dropdowns, color contrast, and role attributes.
Fixed some broken links to supporting documentation.
From here, we don’t expect to ship any meaningful updates to v4.6.x other than major security or dependency updates. Everything will focus on v5 and beyond after this release, starting with the stable release of v5.2.0. Bootstrap 4 will officially end of life January 1, 2023, though you’re obviously welcome to continue using it longer than that. Follow our release repo to stay in the loop on release maintenance status.
Bootstrap Icons v1.9.0 is here with over 140 new and updated icons, including some longstanding requests for new brands, transportation options, numbers and letters, and so much more. With this release, we’re now at over 1,800 icons!
140+ new icons
Here’s a quick look at all the new icons in v1.9.0:
Tons of new brand icons including popular browsers, Ubuntu, Google Play, Android, Dropbox, and many more.
New transportation icons including cars, trains, planes, fuel, and common road signs.
New number and letter icons for 1-9, R, C, CC, H, and P (for use cases like registered trademark, copyright, Creative Commons, hospital or helicopter, and parking).
New medical icons for prescriptions, pills, and viruses.
New keyboard icons for tab and escape.
New Universal Access cions.
Redrawn cup icon, now with a steam variant for hot beverages.
Fire, finally!
There are a handful more in there as well, so have a look and put them to use in your next update! In addition, we’ve updated our docs to include mention of Composer installs.
Looking for more new icons? Head to the issue tracker to check for open requests or submit a new one.
The Figma file is now published to the Figma Community! It’s the same Bootstrap Icons Figma file you’ve seen from previous releases, just a little more accessible to those using the app.
Bootstrap v5.2.0-beta1 added a slew of CSS custom properties, or CSS variables, across the :root level and all our core components. Here’s a quick look at how you can utilize them in your projects.
With CSS variables, you can now customize Bootstrap easier than ever, and without the need for a CSS preprocessor. All the power of Sass is still there behind the scenes, but CSS variables adds a ton of power for the future. Use and compose new values, updates styles globally without recompiling, set fallback values, setup new color modes, and more.
Let’s dig in.
CSS variables?
Their official name is custom properties, but they’re often referred to as CSS variables thanks to their most immediate use case for setting specific values. Consider reading the MDN CSS custom properties article or the CSS Tricks guide if you need a primer.
In a nutshell, CSS variables allow you to name frequently used values. For example, instead of writing #6f42c1 everywhere, you can set --purple: #6f42c1. Then you can use that variable later on with the var() function.
We use CSS variables in Bootstrap to set many property values globally, across our components, and in some of our utilities.
Groups of variables
When we talk about CSS variables in Bootstrap, we’re referring to three major groups:
Root variables — Globally scoped variables available on the :root element (<html> usually) and accessible by any element throughout the DOM.
Component variables — Variables scoped specifically to each component, usually on the component’s base class, and their modifier classes and Sass mixins.
Utility variables — Used as modifiers within other utility classes.
Regardless of where they are, all of our CSS variables are prefixed with --bs-, so you know where they’re coming from and how they might be used across codebases that mix Bootstrap’s CSS with additional custom styles. You’ll also notice that we don’t put all our component variables at the root level. This keeps CSS variables scoped to their intended use cases and prevents polluted variables in the global :root scope.
It’s also worth mentioning two larger efforts that are still to come around CSS variables:
Adding CSS variables to all our forms
Adding more nuanced global theme variables and support for color modes like dark mode.
These are likely coming in v5.3.0 (our next minor release after v5.2.0 stabilizes), so in the mean time, check out the GitHub repo to see how things are shaping up.
Root variables
Bootstrap has a ton of root variables and we’ll only be adding more in future updates for the aforementioned color mode support. As of this post, we have the following CSS variables on the :root element:
Colors — All named colors, gray colors, and theme colors. This also includes all our $theme-colors in their rgb format.
Body font styles — Everything from font-size to color and more, all applied to our <body> element.
Shared properties — For property-value pairings that we consider theme specific, like link colors and border styles.
Root CSS variables are used extensively across other parts of Bootstrap to allow you to easily override our default styles at a global level. For example, if you wanted to adjust the default border-radius and link color for our components, you could override a couple variables instead of writing new selectors.
Without CSS variables, you’d have to use a preprocessor like Sass or write new selectors for every instance of these properties across all components. The former is relatively easy, the latter not so much. CSS variables help solve that.
Component variables
On our components, CSS variables get even more power for customizing. Nearly everything under the Components section in our docs sidebar now has CSS variables available to you:
Scrollspy and close button have no relevant CSS variables, so they’re excluded here.
Throughout our documentation you’ll find examples of customizing our default components by overriding their CSS variables. One great example comes from our own docs where we write our own button styles to create a purple button.
Another great example is from our tooltips. You can add custom classes to tooltips and popovers in Bootstrap with data-bs-custom-class="custom-tooltip". Then, with one CSS variable, you can change the tooltip background and arrow color.
There are dozens of CSS variables in play across our components. All of them are referenced in a new section on the relevant docs page. For example, here are our modal CSS variables. This is in addition to all the Sass variables, mixins, loops, and maps used for each component.
Utility variables
Not every utility class uses CSS variables, but the ones that do gain a good amount of power and customization. Background, border, and color utilities all have what we call “local CSS variables” to improve their usefulness. Each of them uses CSS variables to customize the alpha transparency value of rgba() colors.
Consider our background color utilities, .bg-*. By default each utility class has a local variable, --bs-bg-opacity with a default value of 1. To change the background utility alpha value, you can override that value with your own styles, or some new .bg-opacity-* utilities.
Here’s how .bg-success looks with all our .bg-opacity-* classes applied:
And the same is available for border color opacity (--bs-border-opacity and .border-opacity-*) and text color opacity (--bs-text-opacity and .text-opacity-*). So many color options are now available with these utilities.
By default, we ship with five values for these various opacity utilities.
Expect more CSS variables to make their way into our utilities. There’s a lot of power in real-time customization, even for what we consider immutable styles.
Ready to get started with Bootstrap? Checkout the quick start guide so you can put these new CSS variables to work in your next project!
@mdo
March 24, 2023
