How many times was a Ruby gem installed via `gem install` or `gem update`

Question

I am trying to find out how many times a gem was installed via gem install or gem update.

For example, Watir 1.6.2:

• it was installed 97 times via gemcutter (http://gemcutter.org/gems/watir/versions/1.6.2)
• it is downloaded 4,027 times from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group%5Fid=104

I have been told that 4,027 does not include installs made via gem install or gem update. Is that information correct? If yes, where can I find the numbers for gem install and gem update? I have looked everywhere I could think of at rubyforge, but no luck.

Answer 1

With gemcutter being the new canonical source for gems, you'll have better luck with these statistics in the future. All future gem installs will go through gemcutter. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the old rubyforge download numbers are just web downloads; they don't include gem install or gem update stats.

I'm not sure if the gem install stats exist in any shape or form from the old rubyforge platform, but the person to email would be Tom Copeland.

Answer 2

Yup, I hope to migrate all the download stats over to gemcutter... although we're going to have to do that carefully since there are about 50M rows. That said, here's what I've got for watir-1.6.2 on RubyForge:

gforge=> select count(*) from gem_downloads where gem_name = 'watir-1.6.2.gem';
 count 
-------
 29169
(1 row)