Github release download count – Chrome Extension

April 2, 2015 8 By addshore

The Github IconGitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API.

I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new C++ version of Huggle. At the time I started coming up with some odd little script that I could set running somewhere checking the download counts and updating a static list, I even thought about just uploading the build files to some other site that tracked this information.

A few days ago I took my first look at developing chrome extensions for a referencing tool for Wikidata, and thus today I thought, why not just make an extension for chrome that adds the download counts to the GitHub releases page!

The extension

The extension runs a little bit of JavaScript on all pages that match:

*://github.com/*/*/releases

This JavaScript queries the relevant part of the GitHub API and gets the information for all releases before shoving the download count back into the DOM of the GitHub page as you can see below.

Screenshot showing Huggle release download counts on GitHub

I hope some people will find this useful or interesting to keep an eye on! I know I will!

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