> (More than NPM FYI)

I found your claim hard to believe so I went digging but couldn't find any recent resource on the total number of downloads npmjs.org handles per month.

I could have sworn they used to publish aggregate stats prominently on their home page somewhere ... but can't seem to find it.

Anyway, aggregating* the download numbers of just 12 of the top npm packages comes to about ~504.4m, or half a billion package downloads a month.

*: using September 2018 numbers.

1: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=express - 21m/mo

2: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=body-parser - 24.4m/mo

3: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=lodash - 64m/mo

4: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=async - 64.7m/mo

5: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=debug - 87.6m/mo

6: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=request - 50.8m/mo

7: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=chalk - 64m/mo

8: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=commander - 61.8m/mo

9: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=underscore - 21.5m/mo

10: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=babel-core - 17.8m/mo

11: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=webpack - 16m/mo

12: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react - 10.8m/mo

it cannot be more than npm.

npm is basically 1 line of code = 1 package

Don't forget the dependencies :).

lol, made me chuckle!

I was referring to the number of packages available as being more. It wouldn't be very useful to compare number of downloads since php does need an entire package to do things easily like check if something is an array.