npm-install-analytics

A simple solution to track your personal npm install usage, sending the data to Google Analytics.

Only tested in UNIX shells.

Events

Only install and uninstall commands will send data to Google Analytics. The Event is sent with the following:

• Category: 'install' or 'uninstall'
• Action: the installed module name, like 'tape' or 'http-server@latest'
• Label: a save command if present: 'save', 'save-dev', 'save-optional' or 'global'

Setup

1. Google Analytics

If you already have an active tracking code for a website, you can skip this section.

First, set up a Google Analytics account and create a new property with its own UA Tracking ID.

Copy the tracking ID in Tracking Info > Tracking Code. It will look like this:

UA-51572731-7

Now fork the following repo:

https://github.com/mattdesl/my-npm-analytics

Once forked, you can clone it or just edit index.html through GitHub's interface.

We need to replace YOUR_TRACKING_ID in index.html with your ID, so that the line looks like this:

ga('create', 'UA-51572731-7', 'auto');

After pushing to gh-pages, you should be able to view your static site:

http://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io/my-npm-analytics/

2. Configuration

In your $HOME directory, create a .npm-install-analyticsrc file with the following, replacing your ID as we did earlier:

{
  "id": "YOUR_TRACKING_ID"
}

For example, editing with vim:

cd ~/
touch .npm-install-analyticsrc
vim .npm-install-analyticsrc

3. Install

Install this tool globally with a new version of Node and npm, like so:

npm install -g npm-install-analytics

Now running the following should silently send commands to your Google Analytics. You should see them appear in Real Time Events.

npm-install-analytics install tape --save-dev

4. Alias

This step is optional. You can add the following alias to ~/.bash_profile if you would like to alias the command:

alias npm='npm-install-analytics'

Now when you re-start bash, typing npm install will silently send information to your Google Analytics. Other commands, like npm view, should be unaffected.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.