How does the overall architecture work?

[dogweather]

Hi, I'm very intrigued by the product, but I couldn't figure out:

• How are badges dynamically generated?
• Is this a hosted service?
• Is the code open?
• Or is this simply a design specification, or is there code?
• Is this intended for use by other projects which would like to issue badges?
• If so, how would this be used?

Thanks!

[espadrine]

Thanks a lot for asking!

The code is here, and is open source (CC0). The Shields repo is mostly for general issues, including hosting, design and coordination. The website is there, and gives the ability to generate SVG, PNG, GIF and JPG files, although we advise SVG (although GitHub is working on a bug with those atm).

It is intended both as a badge service for everyone to use, and as a back-end for badge vendors.

Tell me if there's one question I didn't answer well!
Also, if you feel there should be a FAQ somewhere, where should it be?

[nathany]

We probably should have an FAQ at shields.io.

[chadwhitacre]

We probably should have an FAQ at shields.io.

Agreed. However, we're blocking on @olivierlacan and DNS: reticketing that as #115.

[chadwhitacre]

I guess having a FAQ isn't actually blocking on DNS. We can still add a FAQ to the existing homepage. Sorry for the distraction.

[zbeekman]

+1 for FAQ and better documentation

[espadrine]

@zbeekman I feel like it would make sense if an FAQ and technical walk-through would reside in CONTRIBUTING.md (to which we can link from the homepage). Please contribute all questions you'd like to have answered, I'll work on that this week-end.

[paulmelnikow]

After #2661 we'll have some pretty decent documentation of the production hosting which explains the architecture of the system pretty well.

A high-level walkthrough of the code would be helpful. Let's track that in #2684. Feel like the rest of this is pretty well covered by now :)