Creating Svg Badges with C
TLDR;
I wrote a small C# dotnetcore commandline tool for windows to generate svg badges like:
That you can install over chocolatey:
choco install badger
badger.exe -o result-success.svg -l "Testresults" -r "100/100" --lc #444444ff --rc #00ff00ffBackground
I wanted my CI build results to contain nice svg badges like the ones above and I didn’t want to use some internet service, because the build itself shouldn’t depend on internet access and external services.
An option would be to design the svg using a vector design tool like inkscape and export an svg and then use a script to replace the corresponding colors and text.
But that has it’s own drawbacks - it’s very difficult to modify later on and positioning the items before you know the text is tricky - you might need to make your script smart enough to adjust the size of items as well.
Why not go all the way then and write a small commandline application that can create svgs from scratch? So that’s what I did.
Creating Svgs with SkiaSharp
For generating the svg files, I chose the excellent SkiaSharp library (about which I’ve written already here), which has a built-in Svg Backend. Thanks to SkiaSharp, creating a small commandline app that can create an Svg File consists basically of parsing the input and calling the right drawing methods.
I’ve called the tool badger and uploaded it to github.
If you are interested in the code, check out SvgService.cs which handles the Svg-File export and calls BadgeService.cs in turn, which handles the actual drawing.
You can download the source code from github and build it yourself:
git clone https://github.com/8/badger
cd badger
buildInstallation with Chocolatey
Now the only thing that’s missing is a nice way to install it. I wasn’t in the mood of writing an WiX or an nsis installer, because their overkill for a simple commandline app that you can basically xcopy deploy.
On the other hand that doesn’t solve the question of where to upload the installer and how to find the link when you later on need it.
For installing applications and upgrading them on my windows machines, I am a fan of chocolatey, which is package manager for windows, that’s based on nuget. Chocolatey puts the installed executable automatically on your PATH, which is really useful for all commandline tools.
For Windows, I’ve created a package of the compiled executable and pushed it to chocolatey. You can install it using:
choco install badgerIt’s based on the .NET 4.7 Framework, so you need to make sure that it’s installed.
Using the tool
After you’ve build the tool or installed it with chocolatey you can invoke it like that:
badger.exe -o result-success.svg -l "Testresults" -r "100/100" --lc #444444ff --rc #00ff00ffWhich will create the following svg file: