GitHub Download Tracker

A live dashboard of the lifetime release downloads across all your public GitHub repos, updated every hour by GitHub Actions. It costs nothing, and no server or PC needs to stay on.

GitHub resets a file's download count whenever you delete or re-upload a release file, for example to ship a fix. This tracker remembers every release file it has ever seen, so those downloads are never lost from your total.

Example: https://josiahg2502-glitch.github.io/github-download-tracker/

Windows app

Download GitHub Downloads from Releases, install it and enter your GitHub username. You don't need an account setup or a token.

• If you've set up the cloud tracker below, the app loads its full history and adds live counts on top. Click Check now at any time to fetch the latest numbers.
• If you haven't, the app does the tracking itself on your PC. It checks every 20 minutes while it's running.
• Closing the window keeps the app running in the system tray. Turn on Start with Windows in Settings so it keeps tracking after you restart.
• The app has the same charts as the website, plus a card for each repo that breaks its downloads down by release.

To build the app yourself, you need Rust and Node.js. Run this in app/:

npm install
npm run build

Cloud tracker: track your own account with the website

1. Click Use this template → Create a new repository. Name it anything and make it public, because GitHub Pages is free only for public repos.
2. In the new repo, go to Actions, choose Track downloads, then click Run workflow. The first run takes about a minute and creates the gh-pages branch.
3. Go to Settings → Pages. Under Branch, pick gh-pages and / (root), then click Save.

Your dashboard will be at https://<your-username>.github.io/<repo-name>/. After that it updates itself every hour, and there's nothing to configure. It tracks whoever owns the repo, whether that's a user or an organization.

What's counted

• Downloads of files attached to releases in every public, non-fork repo you own. Source-code zips aren't counted, because GitHub doesn't count them.
• Every check is saved on the gh-pages branch: downloads.csv holds lifetime totals per repo per check, and assets.csv holds every release file ever seen.
• Downloads of a deleted file are kept up to its last check. The tracker checks hourly, so at most about an hour of downloads on a file you replace can be lost.
• GitHub turns off scheduled workflows after 60 days with no repo activity. If updates stop, re-enable the workflow in the Actions tab.

Run it locally

You need PowerShell and the GitHub CLI signed in with gh auth login.

pwsh ./track-downloads.ps1 -User <github-username> -Dir ./site -Open