Badge request: Patreon

[eritbh]

📋 Description

I'd like Patreon badges that can display the number of patrons a creator has or the amount of money pledged to the creator per month. For example:

monthly patrons | 3
receiving | $5/mo

(I based these examples loosely on the existing funding badges, but the specific format isn't solid.)

🔗 Data

Patreon has a REST API. At the moment, it appears it requires OAuth to access. There is a post on the Patreon Developers forum about the possibility of including a way to access read-only data about a creator (including patron count and monthly earnings) without authentication. I assume that this issue would be blocked on such an unauthenticated API being created.

🎤 Motivation

I'd like to promote my Patreon creator page on my repositories as a way of obtaining funding.

[calebcartwright]

Thanks @Geo1088, sounds like a good idea!

You are correct that we won't be able to add support for Patreon to Shields until such time as there as an available endpoint on the Patreon side that provides the relevant data points.

An API that requires clients to authenticate isn't necessarily a blocker, depending on the circumstances. There are a handful of other services that Shields integrates with that require authentication, but the auth isn't scoped to a specific user/project/etc. so we just have to create an account in that service for Shields. Another potential solution would be if the service was willing to provide Shields with some kind of appropriately scoped read-only token that we could use to authenticate with the service's APIs.

For now though I've added the needs-upstream-help label. Please let us know if/when an API becomes available!

[calebcartwright]

We've also had others leverage our Endpoint Badge feature to create badges with Patreon data

See #2838 (comment) for more info

[eritbh]

I'll keep tabs on the Patreon dev forum and see if there are any plans to create a readonly API. I don't believe the existing OAuth API supports getting information on other users' profiles, so that wouldn't actually be an option at all.

If Patreon doesn't add support for this use-case, could this project consider including an HTML scraping solution like the one you linked, or is that kind of thing discouraged since it can change at any time?

[calebcartwright]

If Patreon doesn't add support for this use-case, could this project consider including an HTML scraping solution like the one you linked, or is that kind of thing discouraged since it can change at any time?

We won't do HTML scraping directly within Shields for a variety of reasons.

The comment I linked above was from a user that leveraged our Endpoint Badge to create Patreon badges. The Endpoint Badge in short, allows developers to create their own API endpoints that can be used from Shields as long as the API response conforms to the documented schema.

How developers choose to implement their services for use with the Endpoint Badge is entirely up to them.

[eritbh]

That's about what I was expecting, so if Patreon doesn't give an API for the information themselves then there's nothing Shields can do to support it. Makes sense.

Will keep this issue updated with any response from the Patreon devs.

[eritbh]

As an update: A Patreon developer responded back on July 2nd saying that they're considering the feature for their roadmap. I don't see any public roadmap from them so I guess we're still waiting for something to be implemented or not.

[calebcartwright]

Thanks for letting us know @Geo1088!

[amkayondo]

Finally found a Patreon budge 🎶🎉🎉

read more here https://github.com/bevry/badges/

[NatoBoram]

Patreon seems to provide a public API right now.

Testing on Kurzgesagt's ID 73401 and the query data.attributes.patron_count on the url https://www.patreon.com/api/campaigns/73401, I get this :

URL is https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json?color=%23e85b46&label=Patreon&query=data.attributes.patron_count&suffix=%20patrons&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.patreon.com%2Fapi%2Fcampaigns%2F73401.

[eritbh]

Neat, thanks for the info!

It seems like Patreon's API is in a bit of a weird spot - they appear to have stopped providing official support for it, but it's not clear to me what that means for its stability going forwards. I'll probably be using the endpoint solution you posted for now though.

[NatoBoram]

Yeah, they have some pages with server-side rendering and some other pages that are done correctly. I don't exactly know why or how this happened, but anyway, this API is used by them.

[chris48s]

Patreon does provide a documented public API: https://docs.patreon.com/#introduction
It looks like we do need to authenticate but no rate limits are mentioned.