github-buttons

GitHub Buttons lets you add small, clickable buttons to any website that link to your GitHub project or profile. The buttons show live counts for things like how many people watch your repo, how many have forked it, how many sponsor you, or how many followers you have. It's a quick way to show off your project's momentum and direct visitors to your GitHub page.

You don't need to write much code to use them. You head to the project's companion site, ghbtns.com, configure what kind of button you want, and it generates a snippet of code you can paste into your own website's HTML. The buttons themselves are static, meaning they load quickly and don't drag down your site's performance, but the numbers they display stay current because they pull live data from GitHub.

This is useful for anyone who maintains an open-source project and wants to build credibility. If you're a solo developer with a trending library, a startup with an open-source tool, or a company trying to attract contributors, placing one of these buttons on your project's landing page gives visitors immediate social proof. Instead of just saying "popular on GitHub," the button shows the actual numbers and provides a direct link for people to engage with your work.

For developers who want to tinker with the project itself, the source is split into straightforward HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The build process combines these into a single, lightweight file. Running it locally requires a few standard development tools like Node.js and Ruby, and the project's own documentation site is built with Jekyll. The whole thing is open-source and freely available under the Apache 2.0 license.