Awesome Incremented.: GitHub: Boosting your README.md with status badges

One great thing about web-based repository hosting services like GitHub, BitBucket and others is their ability to directly render Markdown documentation as Html. Although typically used for static documentation you can easily enhance the web representation by referencing dynamic content by url.

These days, a very common practice is to include status images, also known as badges, at the top section of your README.md to indicate current quantities and metrics related to your repository, e.g.

current build status (e.g. Jenkins, Travis CI, AppVeyor and others),
package download count, total or per month (e.g. NuGet, npm, gem, etc...),
code quality stats like test coverage (e.g. Coveralls) or technical debt (e.g. with SonarQube)
average time to close issues or accept pull requests (e.g. Issue Stats for GitHub)

This is a great and very simple way to improve the first impression of visitors and to show your professional working style.

How does it look? Head over to GitHub and explore some popular repositories. For example, i like Microsoft/TypeScript or elastic/elasticsearch-net.

Here are some badges of our own projects