After a summer being busy with other stuff, I’m looking forward to an autumn of blogging.

In this blog post, I’ll share a fun investigation into GitHub download statistics, especially their meaning. For every GitHub release, you can use the GitHub REST API to get the release count. But does this number represent the number of downloads started? Ended downloads? Or something else? I couldn’t find anything in the API docs, so I started a short investigation.

TL;DR: The download count for releases on GitHub seems to include simple release link accesses, with deduplication.