GitHub Buttons Gem

A little wrapper for Mark Ottos GitHub Buttons to print <iframe> elements for your views on any open source project pushed to GitHub.

Run gem install github-buttons to install the Gem locally or add it to the Gemfile of any project using Bundler and bundle install.

In this example we'll create three buttons that point to this repository: "fork", "star" and "follow". The templating language here is ERB, though, you're welcome to use your favorite. The GitHub::Button class takes two strings: user name and repository name. Calling the #style method on that instance will allow you to print one of the three button styles with two optional parameters passed in an options hash:

• count: true (displays the total number of followers, stargazers or forks)
• large: true (increases the button size)

The default values for size and style are "small" and "fork". No configuration options are needed to create a small-sized button.

Setting fixed sizes for these buttons can cause overflow issues for buttons including "count" if the width is smaller than the button. This scenario can occur if a fixed pixel width is set. For example, if you were to set the width of a "star" button with count to the exact dimensions of its current size that button would not render properly should the count grow one decimal place further.

For this reason the width has deliberately been set generously. Feel free to tweak this manually using the included HTML classes of star, fork and follow. If an additional specificity is required each button also has a generic github-button class.

The first line creates a new instance of the GitHub::Button class with the user name mmwtsn and repository github-buttons. Each additional line will print a different button. For illustrative purposes all possibile combinations are shown below.

<% b = GitHub::Button.new('mmwtsn', 'github-buttons') %>

<%= b.style('fork') %>
<%= b.style('star') %>
<%= b.style('follow') %>

<%= b.style('fork', count: true) %>
<%= b.style('star', count: true) %>
<%= b.style('follow', count: true) %>

<%= b.style('fork', large: true) %>
<%= b.style('star', large: true) %>
<%= b.style('follow', large: true) %>

<%= b.style('fork', count: true, large: true) %>
<%= b.style('star', count: true, large: true) %>
<%= b.style('follow', count: true, large: true) %>

Additionally, a set of quick helper methods could be written to clean up your views.

# Create a view helper method
 def new_button
   # Create a new button
   b = GitHub::Button.new('mmwtsn', 'github-buttons')
   # Pass the button some default styles
   b.style('star', count: true)
 end

At the time of release, Firefox on OS X was unable to render the "small" (default) button size and, regardless of configuration, strips the first button on the page of its label and count. This appears to be a problem stemming from the original GitHub Button source code.

M. Maxwell Watson

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 M. Maxwell Watson

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