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Add a GitHub contributions heatmap to your dashboard

GitHub already shows your contribution calendar on your profile. Here is how to add the same heatmap to a personal dashboard in about five minutes.

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By the end of this, you will have a small tile outside GitHub showing the same activity calendar GitHub already puts on your own profile: one box per day, shaded by how much you did that day, with a running total. If your GitHub account already has real activity on it, the whole thing takes about five minutes.

Worth saying up front: GitHub already shows you this, for free, with no setup, on your own profile page. This only matters if you want the same calendar sitting next to your other daily tools instead. If that is genuinely what you want, DashSuey is the one dashboard covered on this list built to show it as a placeable widget. Sponsored by DashSuey, made by the people who maintain this list. Nothing else reviewed here offers an equivalent widget today, which is worth knowing before you start.

What you need

  • A GitHub account with some real history on it. The widget reads your actual calendar; there is nothing to look at if the account has no activity yet.
  • A DashSuey account. The free plan works for this: sign up or sign in at app.dashsuey.com, no card required.
  • Nothing else. No personal access token to generate and no API key to paste in. The connection runs on GitHub's own read:user access, granted once, and DashSuey product information confirms the widget itself carries no streaks, themes or history beyond the calendar (dashsuey.com, checked 2026-09-29).

Steps

  1. Create an account or sign in at app.dashsuey.com. A new account starts on Pro for 14 days with no card asked for, then settles to Free unless you choose Pro.
  2. Open the widget picker and find GitHub Contributions in the Developer group, alongside Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Search Console, GitHub Trending, Claude Usage and Your IP Address. Add it to your board.
  3. Approve the GitHub connection when it asks. It requests read:user access only, which lets it read your public activity; it cannot write to any of your repositories.
  4. In the widget's own settings, pick a range: the last 3, 6, 9 or 12 months.
  5. Resize it and drop it wherever you want on the board. Like every widget here, it keeps its own size setting from then on.

If the calendar looks emptier than expected

This is almost never the widget's fault. GitHub's own reference page lists exactly what counts: creating or forking a repository always counts, and a commit only counts if the email address on it is linked to your account, it sits on the repository's default branch or its gh-pages branch, and you have some real connection to that repo (a collaborator, an org member, someone who forked it, or someone who opened a pull request or issue there). GitHub's own troubleshooting page adds the usual culprits: a commit made less than a day ago has not synced yet, and commits sitting only on a feature branch, or only inside a fork that was never merged upstream, do not count at all.

To check the widget itself is working correctly rather than just showing a thin calendar, compare its total for the last 12 months against the number on your own GitHub profile. Both read the same underlying data, so they should match.

Where to go next

For more on what a GitHub contributions widget actually is and why nobody but GitHub itself usually shows up for that search, see what is a GitHub contributions widget. If you want this tile next to Search Console, Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse readings for the same site, see a morning dashboard for people who run a website.