chokidar
Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library
npm says
275,538,661
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 276M
per week
Mirror spikes and crawlers removed. CI and dependency installs still count, so this is not a head count.
noise under 1% of npm's count, so nearly all of it counts. noise real installs
Why this estimate
With JavaScript on, this lists what the filter found for this package.
Most used major version: 3, not the latest one, with 42% of last week's downloads above the crawler floor. Most used single version: 3.6.0.
Snapshot from the daily build of Nov 6, 2026, last 7 days of npm data. With JavaScript on, this page recomputes it live from the npm API.
How many people use chokidar?
npm counted 275,538,661 downloads of chokidar in the last 7 days. Nobody can count people exactly, npm included: it does not record who downloaded what. After removing mirror spikes and crawlers, about 276M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on chokidar, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is chokidar still maintained?
Most likely yes, going by its releases. The latest version, 6.0.0, came out on Oct 19, 2026. The last 12 months saw 2 stable releases. It was first published on Apr 26, 2012. npm lists 1 maintainer.
Is chokidar still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 28% over 3 months and up 164% over 11 months. For scale, the median of the 269 packages we track, which lean towards today's most downloaded, is up 157% over 11 months, so this one is about level with that. Last week, 42% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 3, not the latest one; the most used single version was 3.6.0, with 35%. Weekdays get 1.5× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 6,699 downloads a week, roughly 61 per version.
How the estimate works
- Cut the spike every new version gets from mirrors in its first days.
- Subtract the flat floor robots download from every version each week.
- Show what is left as a range, with a confidence level. It still includes CI and dependency installs, so it is not a count of people.