🛡️🔄 Dynamic TryHackMe Badge Updater

TryHackMe provides a “badge” you can embed in websites. The catch:

• The image badge URL is static (it doesn’t refresh live).
• The iframe badge is live, but GitHub Markdown doesn’t allow iframes.

So if you want your TryHackMe stats to stay up-to-date in a GitHub profile README (like other “stats cards”), you need something that can render the live badge and publish it as an image.

This repo does exactly that:

• A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow opens the live badge page (Playwright/Chromium)
• Takes a screenshot and crops it
• Commits the updated PNG into docs/
• You serve it via GitHub Pages, then embed that PNG in any Markdown

What you get

• A public, cache-friendly image URL you can use anywhere (including GitHub profile README)
• Automated refresh on a schedule you control
• No hardcoded personal IDs in the repository (use GitHub Secrets)

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Quick start (recommended)

Note: The workflow triggers in .github/workflows/update-badge.yml are commented out by default to prevent automatic runs when you first push the repo. When you're ready for the workflow to run (on schedule or manually), simply uncomment the on: block at the top of the file:

# on:
#   schedule:
#     - cron: '0 */2 * * *'
#   workflow_dispatch:

Change it to:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 */2 * * *'
  workflow_dispatch:

This ensures the workflow only starts when you want it to.

1) Fork this repo

Fork it to your account.

2) Add your TryHackMe userPublicId as a secret

In your fork:

• Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret
• Name: THM_USER_PUBLIC_ID
• Value: your TryHackMe userPublicId (a number)

How to find it:

• Go to your TryHackMe profile badge embed option and copy the iframe.
• It contains a URL like: https://tryhackme.com/api/v2/badges/public-profile?userPublicId=1234567
• The number after userPublicId= is what you want.

Note: this value is not committed to the repo; it’s pulled from Actions secrets at runtime.

3) Enable GitHub Pages

In your fork:

• Settings → Pages
• Source: Deploy from a branch
• Branch: main / folder: docs

IMPORTANT: When configuring GitHub Pages, make sure you select the docs folder (not the repository root). If you deploy from the root directory, GitHub Pages won’t find tryhackme_badge.png and your badge URL will 404.

After the first workflow run, the generated image will be available at:

• https://<your-github-username>.github.io/thm-badge/tryhackme_badge.png

Why there is no /docs/ in the URL:

• The workflow commits the file to docs/tryhackme_badge.png in the repo.
• When GitHub Pages is configured with Branch: main / Folder: docs, that folder becomes the website root.
• So docs/tryhackme_badge.png is published as /tryhackme_badge.png.

4) Add it to your README

Example (for a GitHub profile README or any repo README):

<a href="https://tryhackme.com/p/<your-tryhackme-username>">
  <img src="https://<your-github-username>.github.io/thm-badge/tryhackme_badge.png" alt="TryHackMe Badge" style="width: 50%;">
</a>

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Customizing the update schedule

Edit the cron in .github/workflows/update-badge.yml.

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Run locally

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m playwright install chromium

# Generate into docs/
THM_USER_PUBLIC_ID="1234567" python update_badge.py --output docs/tryhackme_badge.png

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Privacy notes

• This tool avoids hardcoding your TryHackMe identifiers in the repository.
• Your generated badge image is intended to be public (that’s the point of embedding it in Markdown).

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License

BSD 3-Clause License - see LICENSE.