Ghdstats is a simple, but very fast, tool to fetch download counts from GitHub releases. You just give it a user, or a user and repository, and it fetches all the necessary details for you.
NOTE: This tool is currently in the process of being rewritten in Rust!
The cli command can be downloaded by running the following command (using Go 1.24 or above):
go install github.com/Jacalz/ghdstats@latest
The general usage of the program works like this:
ghdstats [user] [repository, optional]
As an example, you can get all the data for jacalz/rymdport:
ghdstats jacalz rymdport
The same command can also be written as this:
ghdstats jacalz/rymdport
The tool can also fetch all downloads for a given user or organization:
ghdstats jacalz
The goal here is to be as fast as possible while still keeping very readable code. All repositories for a user are downloaded and processed concurrently for better performance on multicore systems.
A lot of the inspiration for this came from https://github.com/mmilidoni/github-downloads-count. The idea was to create a parallel, and thus faster, tool using static binaries instead of Python scripts.