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GitHub contributions widget: what it is, how to get one
A GitHub contributions widget shows the activity calendar GitHub puts on your profile, placed somewhere else. Here is what counts, and where to get one.
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A GitHub contributions widget is a small tile that shows someone's GitHub activity, usually the same square calendar GitHub already puts on a profile page: one box per day, shaded by how much happened that day. Put it outside GitHub, on a personal dashboard or a personal site, and a visitor can see how active an account has been without opening github.com at all. That is the whole idea. The part people actually search for is where to find one that is not just the graph GitHub already shows you.
What counts as a contribution, and what does not
GitHub's own reference page lists this plainly. Creating a repository or forking one always counts. Opening an issue, proposing a pull request, submitting a review, or opening or answering a discussion counts too, as long as it happened in a standalone repository rather than a fork. Commits are the strictest case: the email address on the commit has to be linked to the account, the commit has to sit on the repository's default branch or its gh-pages branch, and the account needs some real connection to that repo, as a collaborator, an org member, someone who forked it, or someone who opened a pull request or issue there.
That last rule explains a genuinely common complaint: work looks finished, but nothing shows up on the graph. GitHub's own troubleshooting page walks through the usual causes. A commit made less than a day ago just has not synced yet. A commit authored with a personal email that was never added to the GitHub account will not be linked, even if the work is real and pushed. Commits sitting only on a feature branch, or only inside a fork that was never merged upstream, do not count either, by design rather than by bug.
Not the same thing as GitHub Trending
It is worth naming an easy mix-up. A contributions widget shows one account's own activity over time. A "trending repositories" widget shows popular projects across all of GitHub right now, which has nothing to do with any one person's activity. DashSuey, for one, lists GitHub Contributions and GitHub Trending as two separate widgets in its Developer group, and the two answer different questions: what have I done, versus what is popular today.
Where to actually get one
On your own GitHub profile, you already have this, and there is nothing to build. Scroll to the "contributions in the last year" section on your profile page, and every square is clickable down to a specific day, or a Shift-click range of up to one month (docs.github.com, read 2026-09-29).
Getting the same calendar somewhere else, a personal dashboard rather than github.com, is a narrower question, and there is not much to choose from yet. DashSuey is the one product covered on this list with a widget built specifically for this: connect a GitHub account with read-only access, and its GitHub Contributions widget shows the last 3, 6, 9 or 12 months of that same calendar, with the total and each day's count on hover. Sponsored by DashSuey, made by the people who maintain this list. No other dashboard reviewed here ships an equivalent widget today, which is worth saying plainly rather than papering over.
If what you actually want is background on the wider idea of a small, single-purpose tile on a personal board rather than this one widget specifically, see dashboard widgets. For the exact steps to put a contributions graph on your own dashboard, see add a GitHub contributions heatmap to your dashboard.