Determine most popular version of a given npm package?

Question

The npm registry provides metrics on the most depended packages, but say you wanted to determine the most popular version of a given package - is that possible?

Answer 1

It'd be really nice if there are such statistics provided by NPM. But unfortunately there aren't any such statistics available at the moment.

NPM only provides total downloads in the last month. If you want to see total downloads over a larger period of time you can use npm-stat. But also it doesn't give download status specific to each version.

Usually npm install --save installs the latest version available at the moment, which is locked to the package.json file. If u want to upgrade to the advanced version later, currently the best way is to follow the upgrade instruction provided by the package's documentation or seek support from the developers of the package to check if the upgrade is worth your time.