debug
Lightweight debugging utility for Node.js and the browser
npm says
935,388,379
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 935M
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: 4, the latest one, with 53% of last week's downloads above the crawler floor. Most used single version: 4.4.3.
Snapshot from the daily build of Nov 9, 2026, last 7 days of npm data. With JavaScript on, this page recomputes it live from the npm API.
How many people use debug?
npm counted 935,388,379 downloads of debug 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 935M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on debug, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is debug still maintained?
Probably not actively: there has been no release in over a year, though that can also mean it is simply finished. The latest version, 4.4.3, came out on Sep 13, 2025. There were no stable releases in the last 12 months. It was first published on Nov 29, 2011. npm lists 2 maintainers.
Is debug still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 32% over 3 months and up 109% over 11 months. For scale, the median of the 384 packages we track, which lean towards today's most downloaded, is up 164% over 11 months, so this one is behind that. Last week, 53% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 4, the latest one; the most used single version was 4.4.3, with 38%. Weekdays get 1.5× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 12,371 downloads a week, roughly 159 per version.
Monthly downloads of debug
The busiest month was Oct 2026, with about 122,555,706 downloads a day once publish spikes are removed; the quietest was Dec 2025 (the holiday season), with about 53,230,175.
| month | npm downloads | publish spikes removed | real installs | vs month before |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2026 | 3,063,892,651 | 0 | 3.06B | up 7% |
| Sep 2026 | 3,081,242,419 | 0 | 3.08B | up 18% |
| Aug 2026 | 3,008,652,992 | 0 | 3.01B | about flat |
| Jul 2026 | 2,959,036,182 | 0 | 2.96B | about flat |
| Jun 2026 | 2,761,152,254 | 0 | 2.76B | up 10% |
| May 2026 | 2,588,289,299 | 0 | 2.59B | about flat |
| Apr 2026 | 2,403,566,967 | 0 | 2.4B | about flat |
| Mar 2026 | 2,560,897,287 | 0 | 2.56B | up 18% |
| Feb 2026 | 1,960,429,886 | 0 | 1.96B | up 17% |
| Jan 2026 | 1,849,800,731 | 0 | 1.85B | up 12% |
| Dec 2025 | 1,650,135,439 | 0 | 1.65B | — |
Whole months through Oct 31, 2026. Publish spikes are found day by day and summed per month. Real installs apply this week's crawler share to each month's downloads (the upper end also keeps the removed spikes), so they follow npm's curve rather than measure it. The change compares spike-free downloads per day.
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.