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Adding status badges

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This document describes how to create a badge that displays your project’s build status (passed or failed) in a README or other document.

Overview

Status badges are commonly embedded in project READMEs, although they can be placed in any web document. CircleCI provides a tool to generate embed code for status badges. By default, a badge displays the status of a project’s default branch, though you can also display the status of specific branches.

A badge status allows teams to quickly see build statuses in their repository. Badges change appearance depending on their status (success, failure).

You can generate code for the following formats:

  • Image URL

  • Markdown

  • Textile

  • RDoc

  • AsciiDoc

  • reStructuredText

  • pod

Generate status badge code

To get the code you need to embed a status badge for your project, follow these steps:

  1. In the CircleCI web app, select your organization.

  2. Select your project from the tiles or list.

  3. Select Project Settings.

  4. Select Status Badges from the sidebar.

  5. Select a branch to show the most recent status for.

  6. [Optional] If you project is private, select Add API token and in the modal select Add API token once again to add an API token to your project with the status scope.

  7. Select a format for your status badge code from the dropdown.

  8. Select Copy to copy the token. You can now add the badge to your README or other document.

Manually generate status badge code

If your project is integrated with CircleCI through GitHub OAuth or Bitbucket Cloud, you can manually generate a status badge for your project. To check which method of GitHub authorization you have, see the GitHub integration guide.

The manual steps in this section will not work if your project is integrated with GitHub App, GitLab or Bitbucket Data Center

Generate a status badge

To generate your own status badge, you will need to know, and substitute, the following variables in the code snippets below:

  • <PROJECT_NAME> - Your project’s name. Example: circleci-docs

  • <ORG_NAME> - The organization or user name the project in question belongs to

  • <VCS> - your VCS provider (gh for "GitHub" and bb for Bitbucket Cloud)

  • <LINK> - The link you want the status badge to go to when clicked (example: the pipeline overview page)

  • Optional: an API token (to create badges for private projects)

The following examples demonstrate how to generate a status badge for various template languages. Each example also provides a status badge code for a specific branch.

Creating badges for private repositories

[![CircleCI](https://circleci.com/<VCS>/<ORG_NAME>/<PROJECT_NAME>.svg?style=svg&circle-token=<YOUR_STATUS_API_TOKEN>)](<LINK>)

To create a status API token, go to the CircleCI web app, navigate to a specific project, go to Project Settings  API Permissions, and create a token scoped to status.

Badge styles

If you find the default status badge too minimal, you can use the shield style. To use the shield style, replace style=svg with style=shield in the link you generated above.

Passed `svg` version
Failed `svg` version
Passing shield version
Failing shield version

Known issues and limitations

  • In cases where there are multiple workflows running within a pipeline, the status badge will show the result (red or green) of the latest workflow that has finished running. This is a bug. The expected behavior is for the badge to update to show the result of the last workflow once the pipeline is complete.


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