github-stats

A high-performance C implementation for generating GitHub profile SVG cards from live GitHub API data.

It produces two badges:

• generated/overview.svg — stars, forks, contributions, lines changed, views, repositories
• generated/languages.svg — language usage distribution with GitHub language colors

Features

• Built in C (libcurl + cJSON) for fast execution and low overhead
• Uses SVG templates under templates/
• Supports repository/language exclusion rules
• Aggregates:
  • repository stars and forks
  • all-time contribution count (GraphQL)
  • lines added/deleted across authored commits
  • repository traffic views (last 14 days)
  • language size/proportion with real language colors
• Structured runtime logs (INFO, WARN, ERROR) for observability

Requirements

• GCC (C11)
• libcurl
• cJSON
• GitHub Personal Access Token with sufficient permissions

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev libcjson-dev

Build

make clean && make

Binary output: ./github-stats

Configuration

Environment variables:

Variable	Required	Description
ACCESS_TOKEN	Yes*	GitHub token (preferred)
GITHUB_TOKEN	Yes*	Fallback token when ACCESS_TOKEN is not set
GITHUB_ACTOR	Yes*	GitHub username/login (preferred)
GITHUB_USER	Yes*	Fallback user when GITHUB_ACTOR is not set
COUNT_STATS_FROM_FORKS	No	Any non-empty value enables counting forked repos
EXCLUDED	No	Comma-separated repo patterns to exclude (supports glob), e.g. owner/private-*,owner/archive/*
EXCLUDED_LANGS	No	Comma-separated languages to exclude, e.g. HTML,CSS,JSON

* At least one token variable and one user variable must be provided.

Run

export ACCESS_TOKEN="<your_token>"
export GITHUB_ACTOR="<your_username>"
# optional
export EXCLUDED="owner/private-*,owner/archive/*"
export EXCLUDED_LANGS="HTML,CSS,JSON,YAML,SCSS"

./github-stats

Expected stdout:

generated/overview.svg
generated/languages.svg

Generated files are written into generated/.

Local cache mode

• ./github-stats:
  • fetches fresh data from GitHub
  • generates SVG files
  • saves a local cache to generated/stats_cache.bin
• ./github-stats -g:
  • skips GitHub API calls
  • regenerates SVG files from generated/stats_cache.bin

Project Structure

.
├── include/            # headers
├── src/                # C source files
├── templates/          # SVG templates
├── generated/          # output SVG files
└── Makefile

Notes

• GitHub traffic/views requires repository access scope; unavailable repos may return partial view stats.
• Very large accounts may take longer due to commit-detail traversal for line-change aggregation.
• If rate limiting occurs, rerun later or use a token with higher quota.

License

GNU GPL-3.0