Showcase your NuGet package stats with fancy badges

As part of developing SponsorLink v2 I needed a mechanism to determine what packages in nuget.org were popular (in terms of daily downloads), as well as their source repositories and contributors. This is not readily available from NuGet itself.

What I’ll show you here is what powers the OSS Authors page, where you can lookup arbitrary GitHub accounts (user or organization) and see what packages they contributed to, as well as the daily download stats for those packages.

The way it works is three-fold:

1. Scrap a static JSON file from nuget.org with the relevant package stats.
2. Host that JSON file in a public location (i.e. github repo or gist).
3. Use shields.io dynamic JSON badge to render the stats.

The first step is done by the dotnet-sponsor tool:

dotnet tool update --global dotnet-sponsor
sponsor nuget -?

Which renders the options for the command:

DESCRIPTION:
Emits the nuget.json manifest with all contributors to active nuget packages

USAGE:
    sponsor nuget [OPTIONS]

OPTIONS:
                        DEFAULT
    -h, --help                     Prints help information
        --force                    Force complete data refresh. Otherwise, resume from 'nuget.json' if found
        --with-token               Read GitHub authentication token from standard input for sync
        --owner                    Specific package owner to fetch full stats for
        --gh-only       True       Only include OSS packages hosted on GitHub
        --oss-only      True       Only include OSS packages

The command uses the NuGet API to search for packages by the specified --owner and download the nuspec to determine source repository information. It then uses the GitHub CLI to fetch the contributors.

If you’re already authenticated with the GH CLI, all you need to run is:

sponsor nuget --tos --oss-only false --owner [OWNER]

Note the OWNER is the nuget.org account owner, not the GitHub account. --tos automatically accepts the dotnet-sponsor terms of service. Note how you can get package stats for packages that aren’t OSS or where the source repository is not on GitHub.

The result of this invocation is a owner.json file like mine.

Once you upload the file somewhere public, you can now create badges like the following:

[![NuGet Packages](https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdevlooped%2Fnuget%2Fraw%2Frefs%2Fheads%2Fmain%2Fkzu.json&query=%24.summary.packages&style=social&logo=nuget&label=packages)](https://www.nuget.org/profiles/kzu)

[![Daily Downloads](https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdevlooped%2Fnuget%2Fraw%2Frefs%2Fheads%2Fmain%2Fkzu.json&query=%24.summary.downloads&style=social&logo=nuget&label=daily%20downloads
)](https://www.nuget.org/profiles/kzu)

The url parameter is encoded, but looks like https://github.com/devlooped/nuget/raw/refs/heads/main/kzu.json in my case.

Note how I use the query parameter to extract the relevant data from the JSON file, which looks like the following:

{
  "authors": { },
  "repositories": { },
  "packages": { },
  "summary": {
    "authors": "318",
    "repositories": "48",
    "packages": "324",
    "downloads": "288.2k"
  },
  "totals": {
    "authors": 318,
    "repositories": 48,
    "packages": 324,
    "downloads": 288205
  }
}

Totals are the raw numbers, while the summary is a string representation of the totals, which uses Humanizer.

You can fully automate this with a GitHub Actions workflow like the one I run at devlooped/nuget.

I look forward to seeing those badges in your project readmes!