GitHub Badges can boost the readability of a repository by providing users with a fast way to capture the repository metrics. Badges can be embedded in your README.md to clarify the importance and necessity of your project to other developers. As a result, readers get a really fast idea of the repository by checking the attached badges.
There are many GitHub badges available on the internet, here are the top five most informative badges to include in your README.md file. For every badge listed, the equivalent Markdown code is provided.
What Can GitHub Badges Do For You?
Adding GitHub badges to your repository might seem trivial, but in fact it is incredibly useful. All you need to do is import Markdown code from the source to your README.md file.
When I created my Python Programming GitHub repository, I omitted badges. My unembellished repository had the right contents but didn’t stand out. Because of this, the repository gained very little traffic (unique visitors).
After adding more badges to my repository, I saw an automatic rise in the external visitors (from 5 to 767) monthly (view your unique visitors in Insights > Traffic on your repository.)
My Inbox was filled with comments about how well my repository stood out from other Python programming repositories—all because of badges. A simple GitHub badge can completely change the look of your repository.
Always keep this in mind: a badge is worth a 1000 lines of code.
1. GitHub Stats
The GitHub Stats badge demonstrates the total Stars, Commits, Pull Requests, Issues, and Contributions of your GitHub repository.
- Stars: Users save GitHub repositories (like bookmarking). This indicates that the user is interested and wishes stay up-to-date with the saved repository. However, a starred repository cannot be edited.
- Commits: Saving a change in a repository is referred to as a Commit. Various details are appended to a commit, contents, message (description), author name, and timestamp.
- Pull Request: A Pull Request informs others about improvements you’ve pushed to a different GitHub repository, except yours. We often refer to Pull Request as the heart of GitHub Collaboration.
- Issues: GitHub Issues are used to get user feedback, track ideas, enhancements, and list bugs reported to the repository.
- Contribution: GitHub Contributions indicate the number of contributions that have been made to other repositories. A contribution can be made with the help of a Pull Request.
To add the GitHub Stats badge to your repository, embed the below Markdown code in your README.md file.
Make sure you change the username= value to your GitHub’s username. The GitHub Stats badge also provides ranks as well such as S+ (top 1%), S (top 25%), A++ (top 45%), A+ (top 60%), and B+ (everyone). The higher your stats, the better your ranking.
2. Most Used Languages
As the name suggests, the Most Used Languages badge displays the most common languages used throughout GitHub. It is a GitHub metric of which languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Go, and more have the most code on GitHub. The languages are listed in descending order.
To add the Most Used Languages badge to your repository, embed the Markdown below to your README.md file.
The only drawback of this badge is that it won’t list Markdown as the most commonly used language.
3. Contributors Badge
The Contributors Badge displays all the operations such as additions, deletions, and commits that have been performed on your repositories. When you merge a pull request into your repository, the individual who created the request will be added as a contributor. It’s really a good habit to credit the contributors who have invested their time in providing an update to your repository.
The Contributors Badge can be generated using contributors-img, a web application that generates an image to display the list of contributors.
Generating the contributor’s image is pretty trivial. Navigate to the contributors-img website and paste the name of your repository along with your username to generate the URL. Alternatively, simply embed the Markdown code given below to get the image.
4. Random Joke Generator
The random joke generator will generate a technical joke in the form of questions and answers. For instance, “What is a Computer Virus? The Terminal illness”.
To use the badge you need to embed the Markdown code in your README.md file as shown below.
## 😂 Here is a random joke that'll make you laugh!
5. Profile View Counter
The Profile View Counter badge displays the number of times your GitHub profile has been viewed in your profile. To generate this badge, embed the following Markdown code:
To generate the view count of your repository, you might want to use the HITS (How Idiots Track Success) badge. It is a simple way to see how many people have visited your GitHub repository:
But the disadvantage of both the Profile View counter and HITS is that they don’t display the count of the views with unique ID’s. Each time you reload the browser/repository, the counts would be incremented. One could easily get more views by refreshing the page.
Full Implementation of GitHub Badges
I have used my GitHub repository as an example. To generate the badges, it is recommended that you add these codes to your designated README.md file. If you don’t have a README.md file in your GitHub repository, then manually creating one is the best option.
# Top 5 Badges That Will Take Your GitHub Repository to the Next Level
## 1. GitHub Stats
## 2. Most Used Languages
## 3. Contributors Badge
## 4. Random Joke Generator
## 5. Profile View Counter
### Repository View Counter - HITS
There is no need to execute or run the above markdown code snippet on your README.md file. The moment you save the file with (.md) extension, GitHub will automatically render the output and the changes would be directly reflected on your repository.
More GitHub Badges Available
Now that you know how to add GitHub Badges to your repository, it’s a great option for developers and individuals who can use these badges to increase the readability of their repositories. It’s not that difficult — all you need to do is embed few lines of Markdown code to generate the badges.
The more badges you include in your repository, the more attention you will get. A single badge will have the capability to provide useful information in terms of stats, status, and metrics.