download-counts

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

To check monthly download counts of individual packages:

> const downloadCounts = require('download-counts')
undefined
> downloadCounts.lodash
310086369
> downloadCounts.react
169846525
> downloadCounts.typescript
365742011
> downloadCounts.nonexistentpackage
undefined

To get the top n packages, just sort the package & count pairs by count, then take the top n. e.g.:

/** Print the top n packages by download count */
function printTopPackages(n) {
  for (const [name, count] of Object.entries(downloadCounts).sort(
    ([_, cnt1], [__, cnt2]) => cnt2 - cnt1
  ).slice(0, n)) {
    console.log(name, count);
  }
}

> printTopPackages(10)
semver 1819920988
ansi-styles 1714990182
debug 1587998302
chalk 1430249785
supports-color 1427520560
minimatch 1238345778
ms 1212057951
tslib 1140382329
strip-ansi 1114443532
ansi-regex 1028842864

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 once per month, and takes most of the month to run due to the npm API's very aggressive rate limiting. 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, @ExplodingCabbage has maintainer access on GitHub and will try to fix it. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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.