npm Package Scraper — Search, Metadata, Dependencies & Downloads

Search the npm registry or look up exact packages and get back clean, structured JSON: version, description, keywords, license, author, maintainers, dependencies, repository and homepage links, package size, and day/week/month download counts plus npms.io quality scores. It pulls from the official npm registry public API — no account, no API key. Built for JavaScript developers, dependency and license auditors, and OSS researchers who need dependable package data at scale.

Features

• 🔎 Free-text search — run any npm query (web scraping, react state management) and collect matching packages in bulk.
• 🎯 Exact lookups — pass precise names, including scoped packages like @apify/storage, alongside search results.
• 📈 Download counts — fetch downloads for the last day, week or month per package.
• 📦 Full metadata — optional manifest fetch adds dependencies, repositoryUrl, homepage, unpackedSize and fileCount.
• ⭐ Quality signals — capture npms.io score, scoreQuality, scorePopularity and scoreMaintenance from search.
• 👥 People & licensing — author, maintainers and license for compliance and outreach.
• ⚙️ Reliable by design — bulk download calls, chunked pushing and retry-with-backoff keep large runs stable.

What you get

Each package becomes one clean JSON record:

{
  "name": "cheerio",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "The fast, flexible, and elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.",
  "keywords": ["html", "parser", "jquery", "scraper"],
  "license": "MIT",
  "author": "The Cheerio contributors",
  "maintainers": ["feedic", "jugglinmike"],
  "homepage": "https://cheerio.js.org/",
  "repositoryUrl": "https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio",
  "npmUrl": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio",
  "dependenciesCount": 6,
  "dependencies": ["cheerio-select", "dom-serializer", "domhandler", "htmlparser2", "parse5", "parse5-htmlparser2-tree-adapter"],
  "unpackedSize": 143210,
  "fileCount": 34,
  "latestPublishedAt": "2024-02-01T10:23:11.000Z",
  "downloads": 78345612,
  "downloadsPeriod": "last-month",
  "score": 0.91,
  "scoreQuality": 0.95,
  "scorePopularity": 0.88,
  "scoreMaintenance": 0.93
}

Input

{
  "queries": ["web scraping"],
  "packages": ["cheerio", "express"],
  "maxPerQuery": 50,
  "includeDownloads": true,
  "downloadsPeriod": "last-month",
  "includeMetadata": true
}

Field	Description
queries	Free-text npm searches (name, description, keywords). Each is scraped separately.
packages	Exact package names, including scoped @scope/name, combined with search results.
maxPerQuery	Maximum packages to collect per search query (1–1000).
includeDownloads	Fetch download statistics for each package.
downloadsPeriod	Which window to report: last-day, last-week or last-month.
includeMetadata	Fetch the latest manifest for dependencies, repository, homepage and size.

Use cases

• Audit licenses and dependency counts across a set of packages before adoption.
• Compare download trends and quality scores between competing libraries.
• Build a curated catalog of packages for a topic or internal registry.
• Generate outreach lists from author and maintainers for OSS collaboration.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: you're billed a small amount per run and per item scraped — you only pay for what you get. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an npm account or API key? No. The actor reads from the public npm registry and download APIs, so no account, login or API key is required.

How many packages can I scrape per run? As many as you like. Each free-text query can return up to 1000 packages (maxPerQuery), and you can add any number of exact package names in packages — including scoped names like @apify/storage.

Is scraping npm allowed? This actor only reads publicly available package metadata through npm's own public registry and download endpoints; it does not access private packages or require authentication. As with any data source, review npm's terms before large-scale or commercial reuse.

What's the output format? Structured JSON — one clean record per package with fields such as name, version, license, dependencies, unpackedSize, downloads and npms.io quality scores. Export it as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the API.

Can I get download counts and dependencies? Yes. Set includeDownloads to fetch last-day/week/month figures and choose the window with downloadsPeriod, and set includeMetadata to add dependencies, repositoryUrl, homepage and package size.

Related Actors

Auditing dependencies and packages across ecosystems? Pair this with our other developer-data scrapers:

• PyPI Package Scraper — metadata, dependencies, licenses and downloads for Python packages from PyPI.
• crates.io Scraper — Rust crate metadata, versions, licenses and download trends.
• GitHub Scraper — repositories and user profiles with stars, topics, licenses and leads.
• Docker Hub Scraper — image metadata, pulls, stars and tags from Docker Hub.

Notes

This actor uses the public npm registry and download APIs and reads only publicly available package data. It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by npm, Inc. or GitHub; "npm" is a trademark of its respective owner.