Opam package popularity?

Is there someplace a database of opam packages and their popularity? Obviously it’d be inaccurate, but it’d still be interesting to see which packages are most-often downloaded via opam …

3 Likes

The listing at https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/index-popularity.html has the download counts (I think for the latest month, not sure if that means past 30 days or since the start of the current calendar month) as title attributes on the table rows.

5 Likes

Nice! Thank you! I see that the most popular package is one I didn’t know anything about (but by a well-respected author!) I’ll have to check it out, just to see what it does. Sweet!

1 Like

I think it resets at the beginning of each calendar month. So you can try releasing a new package at the beginning of the month and achieve instant fame :wink:

1 Like

It would be nice to display the count, also basic statistics, like in crates.io, with graphs.

1 Like

Those statistics are taken from the opam.ocaml.org repository (default opam one). They are calculated each day, on the basis of the last 30 days (or last 7 days for front page stats).

That link seems to be dead. Is there a new location for that information?

I don’t have the source for this, but I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the download stats were removed to minimize data collection. Also they were artificially inflated by CI jobs.

1 Like

That’s a shame. Would be great to have some idea of which libraries are popular and which are not.

I saw a recent post where someone said they had gone a ways down a route using some particular library only to find that one of its dependencies hadn’t been actively developed for years leaving the whole thing in limbo.

I confirm it was removed with the changes of opam.ocaml.org new infrastructure. There is some ways to do it with respect to privacy (have an access log that is anonymised by default), from which we can retrieve popularity information.
CI and dependencies are not such an issue as they can be handled: make opam notify when it is launched from CI (almost all Cis have CI environment variable) ; and some work was done on removing dependencies from stats and keep only what user installed explicitly (otherwise, ocaml is always the most popular!).
On the other hand, those statistics are biased by caches: if an user installs a package several times, only the first one is retrieved from opam.ocaml.org cache.