verdaccio-downloads-count

Tracks daily downloads count for packages. Data is stored in a Postgres database.

Features

• Tracks daily and total downloads count for packages
• Stores data in a Postgres database

There is currently no web UI or endpoints for retrieving downloads count stats, the only way is via running queries on the database.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Postgres Database (Tested on Postgres 15)
• Verdaccio 5

Install

Install like any other Verdaccio middleware.

npm install verdaccio-downloads-count

Configuration

To use the middleware, you will need to add the middleware to your verdaccio's config middleware option.

middlewares:
  downloads-count:
    # (Required) Connection string to the database. Postgres connection URI. Can also be set by VDC_DB_CONNECTION_STRING env
    connectionString: <Postgres Connection String>

    # (Optional) Automatically migrates the database. Uses the postgres-migrations package for handling migrations. 
    migrate: true

Database Configuration

You will need to configure a database for this middleware to use. You should create a standalone database for this middleware to use.

The connection string is a Postgres URI connection string. It is parsed by pg-connection-string.

Generally, the format will look like:

postgres://someuser:somepassword@somehost:5432/somedatabase

You can set the connection string either in the config, or by setting the VDC_DB_CONNECTION_STRING environment variable.

For creating the schema, it is recommended to use the auto-migrations that this middleware has built in by enabling the migrate option in the config, otherwise the SQL migration scripts can be found in the migrations/ directory within the package (or repo). You will need to grant the user that the middleware is using permissions to insert, create and update. If you are also using auto-migrate, you will also need to grant permissions to create tables and procedures to the user.

Currently, everything needs to be on the public schema.

Querying

Since there is currently no way of getting the tracked download counts through either an API endpoint or a web interface, you will need to query the database manually (or through a dashboard/BI tool). Some example SQL queries are below.

-- Total Download Counts
SELECT * FROM public.package_total_count WHERE package_id = '<PackageId>';

-- Daily Download Counts for a Package Version
SELECT * FROM public.package_count WHERE package_id = '<PackageId>@<Version>';

Why?

Why use Postgres as the datastore for storing package downloads count? Simple, currently all other packages use a different datastore for storing the data, and I already use Postgres in my stack, but not the others, and I don't currently want to introduce another one of these solutions just for storing downloads count.

Other solutions include:

• verdaccio-install-counts - Uses Redis
• @xlts.dev/verdaccio-prometheus-middleware - Uses prometheus

Authors

• Voltstro - Initial work - Voltstro

Thanks

• verdaccio-install-counts - Provided base example on tracking downlands count. parseVersionFromTarballFilename method comes from here too.