Packagist Stats Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Dependency due diligence (build vs. buy): When evaluating whether to adopt a third‑party PHP package, download volume is a proxy for real‑world usage, community traction, and the likelihood of timely fixes. This tool turns that signal into a one‑command check rather than a manual dashboard visit.
• Open‑source roadmap and adoption tracking: Teams maintaining or open‑sourcing a PHP package can track week‑over‑week and month‑over‑month download trends to validate whether a launch, docs investment, or framework integration actually moved adoption.
• Ecosystem/competitive landscape analysis: Comparing download trajectories across competing packages (e.g., two HTTP clients, two queue libraries) supports "standardize on X" decisions and helps PMs argue for consolidation or for staying on a niche dependency.
• Release and migration planning: Spikes or dips in download stats around a major version release inform upgrade‑guide investment, deprecation timelines, and communication plans.
• Internal tooling and reporting: Feeds a lightweight, repeatable way to populate dependency‑health snapshots for architecture reviews or quarterly tech‑radar updates — useful where a full SBOM/analytics vendor isn't justified.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You need quick, scriptable Packagist download figures for a handful of packages and don't want to build and maintain API plumbing yourself.
• You're doing ad‑hoc or recurring dependency/tech‑radar reviews and want raw numbers rather than a heavyweight analytics platform.
• You maintain PHP packages and want a cheap adoption signal without standing up dashboards.
• You value a Composer‑installable, single‑purpose CLI over a SaaS dependency.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need download stats as part of an automated CI gate or policy engine — this is a presentation CLI, not an integration layer; you'll likely want to call the Packagist API directly or use an SBOM/dependency‑scanning tool.
• You need multi‑ecosystem coverage (npm, PyPI, Maven) or security/vulnerability data — download counts alone are a weak health signal.
• You require vendor support, SLAs, or guaranteed maintenance — this is a single‑maintainer utility with minimal adoption and no downstream dependents, so treat it as a convenience, not infrastructure.
• Your environment forbids outbound API calls or you need offline reporting.

Risk note: zero dependents and no visible release cadence mean low bus‑factor; keep usage confined to dev tooling and reporting, never to production runtime paths.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executive summary: This is a small, free, open‑source command‑line utility that reports how often PHP packages are downloaded from Packagist, the main PHP package registry. It doesn't ship in our product — it's an analyst's tool that makes "is this dependency healthy?" and "is our open‑source work gaining traction?" answerable in seconds, feeding faster and better‑evidenced build‑vs‑buy and standardization calls. Cost is effectively zero and risk is contained: it's dev‑only tooling with no runtime footprint.

For engineering: Composer‑installable, single maintainer, no dependents — low adoption but also low blast radius. Use it for quick lookups during dependency reviews and for tracking our own package metrics; if you need this data in automation, call the Packagist API directly rather than wrapping the CLI. Recommend a time‑boxed trial for the next dependency/tech‑radar cycle, with a decision to keep or drop based on whether it saves real analyst time.