DEV Community

I'll make a custom social image for your GitHub repo

Joe Masilotti on November 16, 2020

Hey folks! I'm building an image generation tool that automates link previews. Later this week I'm launching a new feature. But I wanted to give t...

Read full post

Brayden W ⚡️ • Nov 16 '20

Thanks so much! Here’s mine:

🦄 GitHub.com/braydentw/react-emoji-search

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

Sure thing - here's two versions! Would love to know what you think.

Brayden W ⚡️ • Nov 16 '20

Very cool - thanks! So is this what the mugshotbot tool does?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

This is an upcoming feature. It's mainly used to automate link preview images for your blog. You drop in a line of HTML and it dynamically creates an image when share on Twitter/Facebook.

Brayden W ⚡️ • Nov 16 '20

Nice :)

What would the HTML be for? (Sorry for all the questions. This is just a super interesting tool to me :D)

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

No problem at all!

With a subscription you can add some HTML to your

for crawlers to get your image. For example, in the snippet below the ... can be set to dynamically generate images for every page on your blog.

<head>
  <meta name="og:image" content="https://www.mugshotbot.com..." />
</head>

Brayden W ⚡️ • Nov 16 '20

Ok ok ok. That makes sense now 😅. I thought I had to insert a piece of HTML onto the website.

Thanks for your clarification. Is there a free version of this?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

Ha, nope, just a meta tag! And yeah, there is a free version.

With the free version you can generate unlimited images via the web GUI. Automating via a URL and removing the small watermark is a paid service.

Brayden W ⚡️ • Nov 16 '20

Got it - thanks for the info :D

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

No problem! Let me know if you have any more questions or would like to set it up on your blog :)

Akhilesh Balaji • Nov 17 '20

Here's my best Repository:
github.com/akhilesh-balaji/Textylic

Joe Masilotti • Nov 17 '20

Here you go! You can upload an image to github.com/akhilesh-balaji/Textyli... if you want to use it.

Akhilesh Balaji • Nov 17 '20

That looks amazing, Thanks!

Aditya Mitra • Nov 16 '20

Can you do it for my portfolio repo - github.com/aditya-mitra/aditya-mit... ?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 16 '20

Sure thing, here you go! Would appreciate any feedback.

Aditya Mitra • Nov 17 '20

The second one is great.
Are there more themes?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 17 '20

There's one more. It's like the colored one but more saturated. The color can also be completely customized.

Junxiao Shi • Nov 17 '20

I see the examples. Can the watcher and stargazer counts auto-update?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 17 '20

Unfortunately not yet. GitHub doesn't provide an API to interact with this image. So you would have to download and upload manually every now and then.

It takes me less than one minute for each repo and I personally do it about once a month.

Junxiao Shi • Nov 17 '20

I guess it's Puppeteer time?

Joe Masilotti • Nov 17 '20

Oh boy, that would be something! Not sure if I could automate that for other folks though. OAuth kind of breaks down when a tool has full control of the browser.