Download counts are back!

Download stats are back on www.npmjs.org! And if you’re logged in when you look at a package, you’ll get better stats than before, with a pretty graph that looks kind of like this*:

These new stats are powered by a new, public API that anybody can use to get stats about npm packages. It’s the first of what we hope will be several useful microservices under the new api.npmjs.org domain. Let us know what you think, and of course the code is open, so if you find any bugs feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

Speaking of open source: the D3 visualization code itself came largely from this PR by Mikito Takada; huge thanks!

Why did stats go away? And why did they take so long to come back?

Back in early January we removed download counts from the website. This was because the system we were using to count downloads in couchDB was failing to scale, not because of any particular flaw in couch, just because adding up everything in the universe every time is not a good idea.

We took a little time to get downloads back because it wasn’t super-urgent, and we wanted to try out a few things – this is our first service using Hapi, the first time we deployed to the new API domain, etc.

* Yes, there is a weird looking gap from Feb 20-27th where we accidentally dropped logs on the floor. Shh, just ignore it, it’ll go away.