Bootlegance: 70 Bootstrap 5 Themes, One Link Tag Away
Bootstrap is everywhere, and almost every Bootstrap site looks the same. The same blue primary button, the same gray navbar, the same cards. You can spot an unthemed Bootstrap project from across the room.
Changing that shouldn't require a design system, a SASS pipeline, or three days of overriding CSS variables. So I built Bootlegance — a free, MIT-licensed gallery of 70 Bootstrap 5.3 themes. Drop in one CSS file and your entire project gets a new identity.
What's in the Gallery
The collection spans a lot of ground. Ported classics: Catppuccin (all flavours), Dracula, Nord, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, Solarized, Rosé Pine, One Dark, Kanagawa. Design systems rebuilt for Bootstrap: Ant Design, IBM Carbon, GitHub Primer, Fluent, Material 3, USWDS Civic. Operating system nostalgia: Windows 98, Classic Mac OS, Adwaita, Ubuntu Yaru, KDE Breeze. And a few originals — Brutalski, Neo-brutalism, Glassmorphism, Editorial, Swiss.
Every theme ships exactly two modes — light and dark — powered by Bootstrap 5.3's native
data-bs-theme attribute. A different palette is a separate theme, not a hidden
mode toggle. What you see in the gallery is what you get.
One Attribute, Two Modes
The interesting technical decision was building every theme on
data-bs-theme rather than custom class toggles or media-query hacks. That
means dark mode is free:
<html data-bs-theme="dark">
<!-- everything just works -->
</html>Or flip it dynamically:
document.documentElement.setAttribute('data-bs-theme', 'dark');No JavaScript theme engine, no flash-of-wrong-theme hacks beyond setting one attribute early. Bootstrap's own color mode system does the rest.
Integration Is a Link Tag
Every theme is a single compiled CSS file, served from jsDelivr straight out of the GitHub repo:
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/lesichkovm/bootlegance@latest/themes/{theme-name}/theme.css" rel="stylesheet">That's the whole integration. No build step, no npm install, no config file. It works with server-rendered pages, static sites, and whatever framework you already have — which is exactly why it worked when I needed it.
Why I Built It
The immediate trigger was VPS Prices — my VPS comparison tool. I wanted its theme switcher to offer real variety, not "Bootstrap but slightly darker." After wiring in the third hand-picked theme I realized I was building a collection, and collections want to be shared.
So the themes went into their own repo, got a kitchen-sink preview page each (palette, buttons, forms, typography, navbars — the lot), and became a small site of their own. VPS Prices now offers all 70 of them in its theme switcher, which is a decent real-world test suite.
The Gallery Itself
bootlegance.lesichkov.co.uk is a card gallery — every theme gets a live-rendered preview card and a dedicated preview page where you can poke at real components in both modes before committing. The site itself is, of course, themed with Bootlegance.
Everything is MIT-licensed. Take a theme, ship it in a commercial product, no attribution needed. If you build something with it, I'd genuinely like to see it.
