// the find
mdo/github-buttons
Showcase the success of any GitHub repo or user with these simple, static buttons with dynamic counts.
An iframe-based widget that renders GitHub star/fork/watch/sponsor buttons with live counts, served from ghbtns.com. It's a decade-old utility that does exactly one thing: embed a small, self-contained button on any site without requiring JavaScript from the host page.
The iframe isolation model is actually smart — your page's CSP and JS environment don't touch it. Build pipeline is minimal and auditable: three source files get inlined into one compiled HTML file. Actively maintained with CI and CodeQL scanning despite being a mature, narrow-scope tool. Zero runtime dependencies on the embedding site.
Requires a third-party domain (ghbtns.com) to stay up — if that goes down, all your buttons break and you have no fallback. No self-hosting option documented, so you're trusting mdo's infrastructure indefinitely. The dev setup requires both Node and Ruby/Bundler, which is an odd combination for what compiles into a single HTML file. Count freshness depends on GitHub API caching at the ghbtns.com layer — you have no visibility into how stale the numbers are.