Maven Central contains over 260,000 artifacts and serves over 70 million downloads every week. It has become the principal resource for exchanging Java artifacts with demand doubling year over year. Getting artifacts into Central is the most effective way to get your software to developers, since every build tool that can download Java libraries knows where to look for a world of libraries and dependencies, and that single, authoritative place is Maven Central.
Earlier this year, we announced the availability of official repositories in the UK to improve performance for the users in Europe. Today, we are making the artifact download statistics available to the projects whose artifacts are served by Central. This has been one of the most frequently requested features by project teams. Since the raw Central logs are larger than seven gigabytes every day, processing this data is no small undertaking.
The statistics are available to all projects hosted using Sonatype Nexus Repository at:
These three avenues represent the majority of projects actively contributing artifacts. Sonatype Nexus Repository's security mechanism already in place on these instances provides a mapping of repository path to project, which allowed us to easily roll up the counts for each team. Read more to find out how to access your project's statistics.
Current OSS Repository Hosting (OSSRH), Apache, and Codehaus users don't need to do anything to gain access to these statistics. If you have deployer permissions for your project, you should already be able to see the Central Statistics link in the Views/Repositories section in the left-hand menu area. In some cases, users with early access to the plugin have reported needing to click the web browser's Refresh button before seeing the link.
Clicking on the Central Statistics link will open a tab showing you:
If you only have access to a single project with a single groupId, the page will be fully populated upon opening the tab. If you have access to multiple projects or a project encompassing multiple groupIds, you will need to select a project and groupId on which to report. You can also use artifactId and version combo boxes to further narrow down the reporting scope for the timeline, the pie chart, and the grid.
The pie chart and grid can be further constrained by a date range combo box that defaults to the last month, but can be used to report on the last 3, 6, 9, or even 12 months or to select a single month for reporting.
Finally, the plugin offers two types of reports. Downloads is the default and simply reports on the number of successful downloads of your artifacts. Unique Ips is the second report type and gives an idea of how many unique users are downloading your artifacts. It is also possible to export the raw data to CSV so that you can analyze it using your own favorite tool.
Currently, we generate the statistics to a granularity of a single month, so you can expect to see the new results appear within a few days of each new month.
This is just the first release of this plugin, and we invite your feedback and recommendations, not just on how to improve the look and feel of the plugin but also for new reports you'd like to see in the future.