You all know these little images showing the latest version of an artefact or if the tests are passing or showing coverage of the project. We all love them, they are small but so informative. With just one image you convey a bunch of data.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

What’s Maven Badges

The Maven Badges project was started by Jakub Jirutka few years ago and as such was hosted on Heroku, on a free dyno.

The main purpose was to provide missing features of shields.io. Right now shields.io was extended to fill the missing gap, but still Maven Badges has a unique feature of allowing linking to the latest version of the artefact in the Central.

An example badge

How to use it

In order to use Maven Badges, please follow the examples below. At some point we’re planning to add a generator that will generate a snippet in few simple steps, but right now you have to modify one by hand. It is very easy, just put your package and artefact name instead of the markers. Once ready, embed the link in your README.md file used within your Github project. You can use the image link wherever you want, Github is just an example.

An example in Markdown:

[![Maven Central](https://maven-badges.herokuapp.com/maven-central/org.apache.struts/struts2-core/badge.svg)](https://maven-badges.herokuapp.com/maven-central/org.apache.struts/struts2-core/)

We took over Maven Badges

The most annoying problem with Maven Badges was that it was running on a free dyno at Heroku, so the app could only be active for 18h per day. If the available time ran out, the application was down. You couldn’t use it and it affected all the users displaying your project. All the badges were gone, showing just an awkward image placeholder instead.

At SoftwareMill we took over the dyno at Heroku and right now the application is running 24/7 :) You can enjoy your badges non stop, the same affects all the users visiting your project.

You are welcome to contribute

If there is any feature missing, feel free to fork the repo and implement it. Once the PR will be opened, we will review it and apply as soon as possible. I have already applied one outstanding PR to allow define colour of the badge. So don’t be shy and request the feature you want or just register your PR. We are open for contributors.

And the final thing: if you like what we‘ve done so far just leave a comment below or star the project on GitHub.