A cli tool to generate badges

You may have noticed how CI badges are taking over on github. By CI badge, I mean this kind of things: [build passing]
Build status, code coverage, package version, … There are badge for about everything.

I wanted these badges for a school project where we had our own jenkins server running somewhere. The thing is, all of these badges come with the associated SaaS (like travis or coveralls). I wanted a CLI tool to generate these on my server from a bash script and I couldn’t find that so I built it.

The goal was to have one tool able to generate any kind of badge with a unified style and little configuration. There would be shared style settings and different badge kinds which would inherit these settings. Each kind would then take as few configuration as possible to cover all major use cases._ _It also had to be easily extendable so that anyone can add new kinds of badge.

The solution I came up with was to render on an html5 2D rendering context. It is then possible to render badges in the browser or in node using the exact same code.

 

From there, I just had to hook up node-canvas with the existing library, translate CLI arguments to badge settings and that was it. A flexible CLI badge generator. I even added a few built-in configuration files to reduce the number of arguments required to generate popular badges.

The only problem is that node-canvas uses a native library called cairo. This means you need to install this dependency separately. Also npm needs to build c code when you install the package and it can be a real pain depending on your platform.

 

Detailed documentation and install instructions are available on github: