Serving favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC

258
votes

What is the final/best recommendation for how to serve favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC?

I am currently doing the following:

  • Adding an entry to the very beginning of my RegisterRoutes method:

    routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico");

  • Placing favicon.ico in the root of my application (which is also going to be the root of my domain).

I have two questions:

  • Is there no way to put the favicon.ico somewhere other than the root of my application. It's pretty icky being right there at the same level as Content and Controllers.

  • Is this IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico") statement sufficient - or should I also do the following as discussed in a blog post from Phil Haack. I'm not aware of ever having seen a request to favicon.ico in any directory other than the root - which would make this unnecessary (but it's good to know how to do it).

    routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new {favicon=@"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?"});
9
asp.netasp.net-mvcrazorfavicon
Your regular expression should be '\.' for the dot in favicon.ico, not just '.'. – NathanAldenSr
This is what I use (it takes @NathanAldenSr's advice into account, supports both forward and back slashes, and also allows for favicon.png files): routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new { favicon = @"(.*[/\\])?favicon\.((ico)|(png))(/.*)?" }); – BrainSlugs83
@BrainSlugs83 - You solution added the missing piece for me which was the slashes...Here is a .NET vNext version (beta-5). routes.MapRoute("IgnoreFavicon", "{*favicon}", new { favicon = @"(.*[/\\])?favicon\.((ico)|(png))(/.*)?" }); – Rentering.com
Correction, vNext Ignore Route routes.MapRoute("Ingore", "{*favicon}", new { }, new { favicon = @"(.*[/\\])?favicon\.((ico)|(png))(/.*)?" }); Notice thew new {}, – Rentering.com

9 Answers

207
votes

Placing favicon.ico in the root of your domain only really affects IE5, IIRC. For more modern browsers you should be able to include a link tag to point to another directory:

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico"/>

You can also use non-ico files for browsers other than IE, for which I'd maybe use the following conditional statement to serve a PNG to FF,etc, and an ICO to IE:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.png" />
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />
<![endif]-->
228
votes

I agree with the answer from Chris, but seeing this is a specific ASP.NET MVC question it would be better to use either Razor syntax:

<link rel="icon" href="@Url.Content("~/content/favicon.ico")"/>

Or traditionally

<link rel="icon" href="<%= Url.Content("~/content/favicon.ico") %>"/>

rather than 

<link rel="icon" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico"/>
22
votes

1) You can put your favicon where you want and add this tag to your page head

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

although some browsers will try to get the favicon from /favicon.ico by default, so you should use the IgnoreRoute.

2) If a browser makes a request for the favicon in another directory it will get a 404 error wich is fine and if you have the link tag in answer 1 in your master page the browser will get the favicon you want.

7
votes

I think that favicon.ico should be in root folder. It just belongs there.

If you want to servere diferent icons - put it into controler. You can do that. If not - just leave it in the root folder.

4
votes

None of the above worked for me. I finally solved this problem by renaming favicon.ico to myicon.ico, and reference it in the head <link rel="icon" href="~/myicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

2
votes

It should also be possible to create a controller that returns the ico file and register the route /favicon.ico to point to that controller.

2
votes

All you need to do is to add app.UseStaticFiles(); in your startup.cs -> public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env).

ASP.net core provides an excellent way to get static files. That is using the wwwroot folder. Please read Static files in ASP.NET Core.

Using the <Link /> is not a very good idea. Why would someone add the link tag on each HTML or cshtml for the favicon.ico?

0
votes

Use this instead of just the favicon.ico which tends to search in for the fav icon file 

> <link rel="ICON" 
> href="@System.IO.Path.Combine(Request.PhysicalApplicationPath,
> "favicon.ico")" />

Use the requested path and combine with the fav icon file so that it gets the accurate address which its search for

Using this solved the Fav.icon error which is raised always on Application_Error

0
votes

Found that in .Net Core, placing the favicon.ico in /lib rather than wwwroot fixes the issue