download-counts

The https://npmjs.org/package/download-counts package, updated with a new version twice per month, just exports a single giant static object whose keys are package names and whose values are monthly download counts.

Usage:

TODO: add usage example here using the real package, showing counts for like react or lodash or leftpad or something
TODO: also add copy-and-paste-ready example showing getting the top 100 packages which is what 99% of users will wanna do

History/Maintenance/Contributing/Debugging

A version of download-counts was written by @zeke in 2017, then abandoned. It was replaced by a new version by @ExplodingCabbage in 2025.

The build process for generating a new release runs twice per month. It runs in GitHub Actions (for free), where a scheduled job repeatedly calls a single script that, whenever it's called, advances the build a bit by fetching more download counts from the npm API and recording them in source control on a branch specific to that release.

Please report bugs (including the npm package not getting updated with new versions) as GitHub issues.

Hopefully all this will keep working for years and publishing new versions without needing any maintenance. If not, [TODO: who is gonna maintain stuff? In particular, who will have publish rights on npm & ability to update secrets on GitHub? Their names should be mentioned here I guess.]

Failures in the build process will result in a failed GitHub Action, visible at https://github.com/nice-registry/download-counts/actions. The logged output there may be sufficient to debug; if not, you can checkout the latest build branch locally and run node buildAndRelease.js yourself. Credentials are only needed for pushing commits to GitHub and publishing to npm; the rest of what the script does does not require any creds. Change the remote origin to a fork you have push access to before testing in order to allow Git pushes to succeed.