Badges for package download count

[joeldenning]

One thing I like about jsdelivr is that it hosts images to be used as badges within Readmes for projects that show the number of monthly downloads for a particular npm package. See example below:

Does this exist in unpkg? Is it something you'd be open to adding? I would be happy to help out with the implementation of it.

[mjackson]

We would first have to build out some infra to track download counts for certain packages, which we don't currently do. I've experimented before with automatically importing all our logs into Google BigQuery (we're hosted on GCP) but there was just too much data and my costs ran too high.

I think if I were to attempt doing something like this again I'd probably:

• Setup Cloudflare to automatically push logs into a Google Cloud Storage Bucket
• Setup a Google Cloud Function to run whenever something is added to the bucket
• Increment a bunch of counters in a Redis instance

Once that's built, we can provide an API on top that queries Redis and gives you the count. The actual badge should be pretty easy to make once you have the number.

[mjackson]

Side note: we used to track all this when unpkg was hosted on Heroku, and I used a Redis instance for it then. It worked well enough, but I never ported the service over to GCP when I switched hosting providers.

[joeldenning]

Ah I didn't know that download counts were not already available. That makes it a lot harder.

[maraisr]

@mjackson is this something I can help bring to fruition?