How to use <md-icon> in Angular Material?

md-icons aren't in the bower release of angular-material yet. I've been using Polymer's icons, they'll probably be the same anyway.

bower install polymer/core-icons

It actually works now from bower.

bower install material-design-icons --save

It downloads 37.1 KBs. Then it extracts and installs. You will see a folder called material-design-icons in bower_components folder. The total size is around 299KBs

The simplest way today would be to simply request the Material Icons font from Google Fonts, for example in your HTML header tag:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel="stylesheet">

or in your stylesheet:

@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons);

and then use as font icon with ligatures as explained in the md-icon directive. For example:

<md-icon aria-label="Menu" class="material-icons">menu</md-icon>

The complete list of icons/ligatures is at https://www.google.com/design/icons/

As the other answers didn't address my concern I decided to write my own answer.

The path given in the icon attribute of the md-icon directive is the URL of a .png or .svg file lying somewhere in your static file directory. So you have to put the right path of that file in the icon attribute. p.s put the file in the right directory so that your server could serve it.

Remember md-icon is not like bootstrap icons. Currently they are merely a directive that shows a .svg file.

Update

Angular material design has changed a lot since this question was posted.

Now there are several ways to use md-icon

The first way is to use SVG icons.

<md-icon md-svg-src = '<url_of_an_image_file>'></md-icon>

Example:

<md-icon md-svg-src = '/static/img/android.svg'></md-icon>

or

<md-icon md-svg-src = '{{ getMyIcon() }}'></md-icon>

:where getMyIcon is a method defined in $scope.

or <md-icon md-svg-icon="social:android"></md-icon>

to use this you have to the $mdIconProvider service to configure your application with svg iconsets.

angular.module('appSvgIconSets', ['ngMaterial'])  
  .controller('DemoCtrl', function($scope) {})  
  .config(function($mdIconProvider) {
    $mdIconProvider
      .iconSet('social', 'img/icons/sets/social-icons.svg', 24)
      .defaultIconSet('img/icons/sets/core-icons.svg', 24);    
  });

The second way is to use font icons.

<md-icon md-font-icon="android" alt="android"></md-icon>

<md-icon md-font-icon="fa-magic" class="fa" alt="magic wand"></md-icon>

prior to doing this you have to load the font library like this..

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel="stylesheet">

or use font icons with ligatures

<md-icon md-font-library="material-icons">face</md-icon>

<md-icon md-font-library="material-icons">#xE87C;</md-icon>

<md-icon md-font-library="material-icons" class="md-light md-48">face</md-icon>

For further details check our

Angular Material mdIcon Directive documentation

$mdIcon Service Documentation

$mdIconProvider Service Documentation