read-pkg-up
Read the closest package.json file
Deprecated on npm. The maintainers' message: “Renamed to read-package-up”
npm says
41,918,772
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 41.9M
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: 7, not the latest one, with 53% of last week's downloads above the crawler floor. Most used single version: 7.0.1.
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 read-pkg-up?
npm counted 41,918,772 downloads of read-pkg-up 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 41.9M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on read-pkg-up, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is read-pkg-up still maintained?
No: the latest version is marked deprecated on npm, with the message “Renamed to read-package-up”. The latest version, 11.0.0, came out on Nov 3, 2023. There were no stable releases in the last 12 months. It was first published on Sep 3, 2015. npm lists 1 maintainer.
Is read-pkg-up still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 6% over 3 months and up 14% 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 behind that. Last week, 53% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 7, not the latest one; the most used single version was 7.0.1, with 53%. Weekdays get 1.7× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 770,405 downloads a week, roughly 55,029 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.