Downloads

Overview

Download figures count requests logged by distribution channels. They are not counts of installs or users. Each channel publishes its own totals, and this site reads them.

Illustrative numbers for an invented package. The layout shows a yearly headline, a rank, daily and monthly rates, a chart with release markers, windowed totals, and chips for other channels.

The headline on a CRAN package page counts downloads from the Posit Cloud mirror over the last 365 days, via cranlogs. The rank beside it covers 90 days. The per-day and per-month rates are the yearly total divided by 365 and 12.

Sources

Downloads are collected from seven channels. Only the first is a CRAN mirror; the rest repackage R packages for other platforms.

CRAN (cranlogs)

Posit Cloud mirror logs, about a day behind. Source and binary downloads are summed with no split by platform.

Bioconductor

Monthly statistics from the project. No daily per-package counts. Ranks are within a Bioconductor category, not across them.

r2u

HTTP fetches of .deb files. No bot filtering or deduplication.

conda-forge and bioconda

Anaconda CDN events, deduplicated and summed across platforms. Third-party mirrors are not included.

autoCRAN (openSUSE)

Redirect events from the openSUSE MirrorCache, counted by RPM name.

Fedora Copr

CDN redirect hits for the repository as a whole. No per-package breakdown is available.

c2d4u

Launchpad publication downloads from the Ubuntu PPA. These figures are currently frozen.

Time windows and refresh

Each channel publishes totals over its own time windows (typically 30 days, 90 days, and 365 days). The windows are anchored to the pipeline's own clock, not the day you read the page, and recent days may be revised.

The per-day and per-month rates are simple arithmetic (the yearly total divided evenly), not daily measurements. A rank is computed over every package the channel has a record for, including recently archived ones.

The daily chart

The chart plots daily counts for the last 365 days. Dashed vertical lines mark package releases and R releases. When multiple channels have daily data, toggles let you switch between them. All channels share one y axis, so a smaller channel will appear flat alongside a larger one.

The compare view overlays up to three packages on one chart. The Split Stream option gives each selected channel its own chart and y axis.

Combined totals

The downloads overview page adds all available channels into one headline number. This total includes double counting: a package available on CRAN, r2u, and conda-forge contributes three times. The composition strip shows the relative size of each channel's count, not market share.

The per-source breakdown on individual package pages avoids this issue. Each figure there is one channel over one window.

Interpreting download figures

The most reliable comparison is a package against itself over time on one channel. Cross-channel comparisons are not meaningful because the channels count different things over different windows.

Every channel counts requests, not people or installs. CI runs and container builds are included. The CRAN figure comes from one mirror, so it understates total use. A package with no download row shows no figure rather than zero, and the package listing shows a dash for both.