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pypistats.org -> shields.io

2018-10-30

This past weekend I noticed a spike in traffic coming to pypistats.org. The website went from a few hundred requests per day to over 20k per day. Taking a look at the logs showed that almost all of the requests were hitting the JSON API from shields.io.

shields.io is a service that provides those nifty badge icons that a lot of open source projects use to highlight project information and metadata. I have several of them attached to my web resume and projects pages here on this website.

Years ago they dropped support for their PyPI download count badges because the PyPI stopped providing the data via their API. In lieu of those counts the PyPI began pushing download records to a publicly accessible BigQuery database; the same database that is used to provide aggregations for pypistats.org.

The PyPI download badges are now back and using pypistats.org as their source. Here are a few badges for some of my (not very popular) python packages:

package	badge
fbm
stochastic
celery-slack
chicken-dinner

Further reading

pypistats.org

• site
• api
• source

shields.io

• site
• source

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