Npm is the largest package registry in the world, both in downloads and number of packages. At the beginning of 2015 npm has about 12.500 packages, that number grew to 486.661 right now. At the same time, last year 160 people published their first package every week and according to Ashley Williams, Developer Community and Content Manager, that number is expected to grow to 200 in 2017.
In a virtual sea of packages some steal get more attention than other. These are the packages that developers install a lot. The order is based on the number of total downloads (this list represents packages that are installed often, not the most downloaded packages on npm). All the data presented is from February 2015 onwards.
1 express
Express is a very popular package with 160,809,503 downloads so far. It has a very steady growth, peaking in March with a little over 12 million downloads.
Stats
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530,128 downloads in the last day
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3,085,633 downloads in the last week
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12,253,909 downloads in the last month
2 npm
Npm has 87,779,138 downloads. It first hit a high point in May and June 2015 and then in September 2016. This year, so far, is after the 3 million downloads/month mark.
Stats
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142,427 downloads in the last day
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769,810 downloads in the last week
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3,250,174 downloads in the last month
3 browserify
browserify was downloaded 58,806,324 times. Its most popular months are November 2015 and March 2017. The drop at the end is the month of May (which is not over at the time when this article is being written)
Stats
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94,242 downloads in the last day
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596,476 downloads in the last week
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2,754,831 downloads in the last month
4 bower
Bower has 56,646,535 downloads, in its first (tracked) month it has a little over a million downloads, while last month it had 2.1 million downloads. It grew slowly but steadily.
Stats
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109,460 downloads in the last day
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574,339 downloads in the last week
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2,425,566 downloads in the last month
5 gulp
Gulp has 55,391,102 total downloads. Since it was released it followed a mostly upward trend with it’s highest point in March 2017 and November 2016.
Stats
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141,435 downloads in the last day
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741,456 downloads in the last week
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3,084,541 downloads in the last month
6 grunt
Grunt has 44,831,357 total downloads. It grew consistently since 2015 and its bets months yet are August/September 2016 and March 2017.
Stats
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94,217 downloads in the last day
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476,082 downloads in the last week
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2,085,160 downloads in the last month
7 grunt-cli
Grunt-cli currently has 33,607,269 total downloads. For about a year it grew slowly, then it jumped up from approximately 1 million downloads per months to 1.6 in April 2016. It’s also a part of grunt now.
Stats
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72,658 downloads in the last day
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380,167 downloads in the last week
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1,657,242 downloads in the last month
8 forever
Forever has 17,577,427 downloads, with a very slow growth, even with a bit of a drop in its first year, then jumping off the chart in the summer of 2016 and falling down again. Since January 2017 is has slowly climbed back up the ladder.
Stats
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16,014 downloads in the last day
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128,593 downloads in the last week
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990,269 downloads in the last month
9 Cordova
Cordova doesn’t shoot right ot the top, but it still gets there. It slowly grew to ~ 500k downloads in December 2015, then dropped for about a year, picking up again in February and March 2017. It has 9,218,040 total downloads.
Stats
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24,421 downloads in the last day
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177,173 downloads in the last week
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660,780 downloads in the last month
Cover photo from blog.npmjs.org, stats from npm-stat.com and npmjs.com.
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