Weecology's Wiki
Computing
Software Use Statistics

Statistics for Software Use

It can be helpful to know how frequently your software is being downloaded to assess it’s use and report on its impact. Below are instructions for how to do this for different languages. Keep in mind that downloads can be influenced by automated testing systems if they install the software from the central repository.

R

These instructions get downloads from the cloud CRAN mirror. This is a minimum estimate of total downloads.

  • Install the cranlogs package install.packages("cranlogs")
  • Run the cran_downloads function with your package name and date ranges if desired
downloads = cranlogs::cran_downloads(packages = c("portalr"), from = "2020-02-26", to = "2020-08-16")
total_downloads = sum(downloads$count)

Python

Python packages are often distributed using both PyPI and conda so you might need to get download statistics for both.

PyPI

Using the PyPI Stats website

Using Google BigQuery

  • Setup a Google BigQuery account
  • Run a version of this query where with additional modifications as necessary
SELECT COUNT(*) downloads
FROM `the-psf.pypi.downloads2020*`
WHERE file.project='retriever'

Conda

  • Install the condastats package conda install -c conda-forge condastats
  • From the command line run a version of the following command
condastats overall retriever --start_month 2020-01 --end_month 2020-08