GitHub Profile Views Counter is a free, MIT-licensed PHP micro-service that counts how many times a GitHub profile has been viewed and renders that number as a badge inside the profile's own README.

What it is

GitHub Profile Views Counter (abbreviated GHPVC in its own documentation) is a small, open-source service in the GitHub profile-README ecosystem. It accepts HTTP requests generated by a Markdown image tag, increments a counter for the requested username, and returns a Shields-style SVG badge showing the accumulated total. The project lives in the space occupied by profile badges and README widgets: the repository has drawn 5,024 stars and 429 forks, is written in PHP, and is published under the MIT licence.

The concrete problem it solves is that a GitHub profile page offers no built-in view metric. A profile owner can see followers, stars and contributions, but not how often the page itself was opened. GHPPVC fills that gap by turning a single Markdown line into a persistent, self-hosted-analytics-style readout. The README frames the counter as an analytical instrument for the profile owner rather than a display for visitors, and suggests it can be used to observe view dynamics resulting from development activity, blogging, or taking part in a conference. The project also positions itself as displaceable: the owner can deploy a standalone instance to register any view count desired without sending traffic to the upstream server.

Key capabilities

• Counts profile views per username and serves the total as an SVG badge through the https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username endpoint.
• Accepts any valid HEX colour for the badge, or one of the predefined named colours brightgreen, green, yellow, yellowgreen, orange, red, blue, grey, lightgrey and blueviolet; blue is the default.
• Documents that HEX colours must be passed without the # prefix, as in color=dc143c.
• Renders the badge in five styles — flat (default), flat-square, plastic, for-the-badge, and pixel, the last described as an "invisible" mode for use when the counter should not be displayed.
• Runs as a 100% free cloud solution, with a standalone deployment option for self-hosters who want their own instance and their own numbers.
• Is distributed as PHP source under the MIT licence, with an active issue tracker carrying 11 open issues at the time of the last push on 26 January 2026.
• Is indexed under analytics-oriented topics including analytics, github-analytics, view-counter, visitor-counter and profile-readme.

Who uses it and how

• Individual developers who maintain a GitHub profile repository named identically to their username, which is the mechanism the README describes for enabling the profile README in the first place.
• Writers, conference speakers and maintainers who want to correlate spikes in profile traffic with a release, a post or a talk, using the counter as a longitudinal instrument rather than a vanity badge.
• Self-hosters who want an arbitrary or inflated count and are told to deploy a standalone instance rather than spam the shared server.
• Cost-sensitive users who want the metric without paying for a hosted analytics product, since the cloud offering is free and the README asks only for voluntary help with server costs.

Getting started

The documented path is the hosted service: create a repository named after your username, then add an image line such as ![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username) to README.md. A standalone deployment is also offered for users who want their own instance.

How it compares

The README names one comparable service, Ÿ HŸPE, and recommends it as the more robust and feature-rich solution, describing GHPPVC itself as a proof of concept. That framing is the project's own honest positioning: it is the simpler, free, MIT-licensed option in a category where a more capable alternative exists, and it explicitly makes room for that alternative.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster takes on operating a PHP web service and whatever backing store it uses, and the README excerpt provided here does not document database, storage, SMTP or deployment requirements, so the operational surface must be worked out from the source. Anyone who needs a trustworthy, unfakeable metric should look elsewhere: the README states plainly that any counter can be faked, and that a billion fake profile views makes a person with a billion in the counter rather than a popular one. Given the project describes itself as a proof of concept and points readers toward Ÿ HŸPE for robustness and features, teams wanting a maintained, feature-rich counter should not start here.

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&color=green)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&color=dc143c)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&style=flat-square)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&label=PROFILE+VIEWS)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&base=1000)

![](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=your-github-username&abbreviated=true)