Obsidian Plugin Stats

Fetch and maintain Obsidian plugin download stats from the command-line.

Obsidian provides quite detailed statistics about its plugins in JSON format at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/HEAD/community-plugin-stats.json . These are easy to parse. I previously used the following script using curl and jq to get statistics:

curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/HEAD/community-plugin-stats.json | jq ".[\"${1:-plugin-repl}\"]"

One limitation is that these are statistics at a particular time. It would be nice to see these change over time so that I can have a feeling of progress.

For this reason, I made this tool which keeps track of statistics over time.

Installation

You can install this tool with pipx:

pipx install obsidian-plugin-stats

Usage

The following shows the number of downloads for the plugin plugin-repl

obsidian-plugin-stats plugin-repl

Note that this will return the same value for the entire day (though these statistics appear to only be updated daily anyway).

You can raw statistics with --raw like so:

obsidian-plugin-stats --raw plugin-repl

You can get a timeseries of historic data in the JSONL format using

obsidian-plugin-stats --timeline plugin-repl

To maintain statistics you may wish to run obsidian-plugin-stats daily using, for example, a systemd timer or cron job.

If this data is valuable to you might like to back up ~/.local/state/obsidian-plugin-stats. I have this symlinked to a directory which I back up.

Support

If you found this tool useful you could make a donation ($2 maybe?) on my ko-fi which will incentivize me to make and maintain tools like this.

Also, if you looked at this tool you are likely making a plugin for Obsidian. You may well be interested in my tool Plugin REPL which is designed to rapidly scripting Obsidian and iterating on plugins.

About me

I am @readwithai I make tools related to reading and research sometimes using the [Obsidian markdown editor]. I get quite a lot of value from using Obsidian for "drive-by" note taking while coding, Obsidian makes it easy to quickly find a page and jot down some notes in a place where you will find it again when thinking about the same thing. I wrote some notes about this here .

I also tend to produce a stream of productivity tools like this.

If any of this sounds interesting you can follow me on X where I write about this sort of thing. If you are interested in Obsidian, note-taking or research you might like my blog.