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Hi everyone,

I publish a design system (DS) to the Community and have frequent updates to fix issues and add/update components.


Community members duplicate this DS to their Organizational account to use in projects. They have reported to me that once they import the Figma file into their org and use it as a library they have no way of getting the updates easily and without breaking changes into their production design files that refer to the original duplicated file.


So is there a way to publish “get latest” or “subscribe to changes” in a community file. In other words is there a way to branch to/from a Community file?


If not would this work:



  1. Duplicate file A to local Organization and use as library in a project;

  2. Duplicate file B to local organization (Updated version of A);

  3. Create branch of File A then Copy/paste all of File B into that branch (<–scary part as it may create links to file B I have no idea how to remove AND I may lose my Type and Color Style)

  4. Merge branch with all changes back into main branch of file A

  5. Publish updates to library


Is there some other smarter way to get changes without “breaking” ongoing projects using previous iterations of community files?

Bumping this up with a comment for exposure

I have been searching for a similar feature and it seems that there is no current method of achieving this natively. Please let me know if you have managed to find a method in which you are able to seamless track community files’ version status.


On another note, I believe that one can create a bot that monitors a Figma community file and runs a script that replaces the local duplicate on update. By using the native swap library feature if the updated file does not change the naming structure of the components and styles re-publishing the file in your team should be the only thing needed to update it in all projects that use elements from it.

However, I believe that Figma will not allow such a feature as it circumvents the organization wide libraries feature found in the Figma Organization subscription plan by allowing users to simulate the same feature by leveraging the community.

Hello @Saleh2,

I’ll definitely let you know if I find a solution to this. It’s definitely a functional gap in Figma that SwapLibrary does not address properly imho. We may end up having building a custom solution to address it.

Update: Now that Figma will start accepting payments for ressources on the Community it makes even more sense to allow Subscribing to file updates.

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