Show package usage by version

[VikramTiwari]

This is based on the discussion on twitter thread. I am phrasing these from various authors in twitter thread. See thread for more clarity.

Currently the download statistics allow to see overall adoption of library. But this is not good enough when it comes to understanding adoption of different package versions. The use cases range from getting some understanding of how your beta is performing, to making decisions about shipping a security fix on an older release. Also, having a graph of version mapping and downloads between modules would be massive for better understanding of ecosystem relationships.

[reconbot]

I second this. For my packages with binary downloads looking at their downloads overtime has been a much better indicator of what’s versions and platforms in wide adoption. It’s always surprising to see how different platforms lag node versions or haven’t upgraded.

[MylesBorins]

To clarify... this is specifically about download stats, and not usage stats? Specifically we currently show "dependents" but not specify which versions they depend on.

[reconbot]

I’d want usage but without some sort of opt in reporting I’ll take downloads.

[trivikr]

Rust Crates shows package downloads by version. It gives an idea of adoption for each version.
Example: https://crates.io/crates/tokio

[jasonwilliams]

I don't know if in this context what the difference between downloads and usage is but I would like to see what crates.io does with Rust. Where you can see downloads by version https://crates.io/crates/rand

[MylesBorins]

This is going to be worked on this quarter!

You can track progress in this issue on the roadmap npm/roadmap#19

[Jolg42]

😍 the API https://api.npmjs.org/versions/fastify/last-week
For scope packages the / needs to be escaped https://api.npmjs.org/versions/@prisma%2fclient/last-week

[simonplend]

Love this new feature! 👌

I'm building a tool to display stats on package downloads by version, but I can imagine that this new endpoint will be generally useful for the Node.js community.

Would it be possible to include the new version downloads endpoint (https://api.npmjs.org/versions/{package}/last-week) in the API documentation for package download counts?

[Jolg42]

+1

Also I'm interested to check out your tool if it's open source 😃

[simonplend]

I was originally intending to build a web based tool, but that's not as straightforward as I'd hoped it would be due to the absence of CORS headers on the public registry endpoints (related discussion: #117).

As a starting point I've thrown together a proof-of-concept CLI tool: https://twitter.com/simonplend/status/1355981842579644420 - I'd really like to develop it further 😃

[Jolg42]

So I just checked these 2 API and both return CORS headers I think:

https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-week/fastify

access-control-allow-headers | Authorization, Content-Type, If-None-Match
-- | --
access-control-allow-methods | GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS
access-control-allow-origin | *
access-control-expose-headers | WWW-Authenticate, Server-Authorization

https://api.npmjs.org/versions/fastify/last-week

access-control-allow-headers | Authorization, Content-Type, If-None-Match
-- | --
access-control-allow-methods | GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS
access-control-allow-origin | *
access-control-expose-headers | WWW-Authenticate, Server-Authorization

Maybe that's new? What CORS problem did you get?

[simonplend]

The issue is with the registry public endpoints - it looks like you've seen that now 🙂 #117 (comment)