How to Add a GitHub Stats Card to Your Profile README

The github-readme-stats project (70,000+ stars) generates dynamic SVG cards from your GitHub data. The core stats card displays: total stars earned across all your public repositories, total commits (current year by default, or all time if you enable the option), pull requests opened, issues created, and a composite score called 'Contribution Score' derived from these metrics.

The card answers the most basic question any visitor has: does this person actually contribute code? A developer with thousands of commits and hundreds of stars earned has verifiable activity that no amount of self-description can replicate. The card renders in real time from GitHub's public API, so the numbers stay current without manual updates.

Add this to your README, replacing YOUR_USERNAME:

![GitHub Stats](https://github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api?username=YOUR_USERNAME&show_icons=true&theme=tokyonight&count_private=true&include_all_commits=true)

Critical parameters to always include:

• count_private=true — counts contributions from private repositories (most professional developers do meaningful work in private repos; without this, your stats look deflated)
• include_all_commits=true — shows commits from all years, not just the current calendar year
• show_icons=true — adds small icons next to each stat for better readability

Optional parameters:

• hide=issues — hides specific stats (comma-separated: stars,commits,prs,issues,contribs)
• rank_icon=github — shows a letter rank (S, A, B, C) based on your stats
• show=reviews,discussions — adds review count and discussion count to the card

The stats card ships with 30+ built-in themes. The most commonly used:

• tokyonight — dark navy with cyan/green accents (matches popular editor theme)
• radical — pink/purple gradient on dark background
• transparent — no background, inherits GitHub's page color (works in both light and dark mode)
• dark — simple dark card with white text
• gruvbox — warm amber and green tones
• github_dark — matches GitHub's own dark mode palette

For profiles using both light and dark mode GitHub, transparent is the safest choice — it blends into whatever background the visitor has set. Themes with solid light backgrounds (like default) create a jarring white box on dark-mode profiles.

If the card shows 'Maximum retries exceeded', the public Vercel instance is rate-limited. Wait a few minutes or deploy your own instance by forking the repository to Vercel (takes 5 minutes, eliminates rate limits permanently).

If your stats appear lower than expected for a senior developer, add &count_private=true&include_all_commits=true — many experienced developers do most of their work in private repositories and their public stats look sparse without these flags.

If the theme looks wrong in dark mode, switch to transparent or github_dark. If the card width doesn't fit your layout, add &card_width=500 (or any pixel value) to control the output width.