prebuild-install
A command line tool to easily install prebuilt binaries for multiple version of node/iojs on a specific platform
Deprecated on npm. The maintainers' message: “No longer maintained. Please contact the author of the relevant native addon; alternatives are available.”
npm says
32,199,959
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 32.2M
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.
Snapshot from the daily build of Nov 10, 2026, last 7 days of npm data. With JavaScript on, this page recomputes it live from the npm API.
How many people use prebuild-install?
npm counted 32,199,959 downloads of prebuild-install 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 32.2M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on prebuild-install, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is prebuild-install still maintained?
No: the latest version is marked deprecated on npm, with the message “No longer maintained. Please contact the author of the relevant native addon; alternatives are available.”. The latest version, 7.1.3, came out on Jan 22, 2025. There were no stable releases in the last 12 months. It was first published on May 17, 2016. npm lists 6 maintainers.
Is prebuild-install still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 38% over 3 months and up 194% 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 ahead of that. Last week, 97% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 7, the latest one; the most used single version was 7.1.3, with 90%. Weekdays get 1.7× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 994 downloads a week, roughly 21 per version.
Monthly downloads of prebuild-install
The busiest month was Oct 2026, with about 4,014,799 downloads a day once publish spikes are removed; the quietest was Dec 2025 (the holiday season), with about 1,324,378.
| month | npm downloads | publish spikes removed | real installs | vs month before |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2026 | 104,384,764 | 0 | 104M | up 10% |
| Sep 2026 | 98,282,680 | 0 | 98.2M–98.3M | up 15% |
| Aug 2026 | 98,280,706 | 0 | 98.2M–98.3M | about flat |
| Jul 2026 | 93,663,432 | 0 | 93.6M–93.7M | up 10% |
| Jun 2026 | 82,740,392 | 0 | 82.7M | up 11% |
| May 2026 | 76,976,161 | 0 | 76.9M–77M | up 7% |
| Apr 2026 | 69,305,887 | 0 | 69.3M | about flat |
| Mar 2026 | 71,040,715 | 0 | 71M | up 19% |
| Feb 2026 | 53,836,970 | 0 | 53.8M | up 27% |
| Jan 2026 | 46,891,871 | 0 | 46.9M | up 14% |
| Dec 2025 | 41,055,720 | 0 | 41M–41.1M | — |
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.