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Ask HN: With open source software, how do I find out where my users come from?

5 points by burning_hamster ↗ HN
Hi HN, I am writing and maintain a open source python library for making network visualisations [1]. Since that is a fairly specialised task, the software typically only gets a couple dozen downloads a day on PIPy (the python package index). It is a labor of love, not my source of income, so that is totally fine by me. However, last weekend, there was a huge spike in downloads: instead of the 0-5 downloads that are typical for a normal weekend day, there were 2000 downloads, both on Saturday and Sunday [2]. I would love to know what happened here, or at least, I would like to be able to find out the next time something like this happens. Obviously, unlike a normal business, I don't control the distribution, so I can't measure the traffic with Google Analytics or similar tools.

I would love to hear how other people that have open source projects are getting their intel into their user base.

[1] https://github.com/paulbrodersen/netgraph

[2] https://pepy.tech/project/netgraph

8 comments

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sanketsarang
The first thing I would do is check if your Github repository is showing the traffic source. If your primary documentation is on Github, then you would expect most people to visit it in order to figure out how to use your software.
burning_hamster
Yeah, I did. There wasn't much there. A few more people than usual but well within the margin of error. The majority being referred from Google.
sanketsarang
Hmm... not really found another way of doing this. Would be very keen on seeing what others are doing.
TheMonarchist
I think the increased traffic is due to something more popular now depending on OP's library. Their users won't come to its repository for documentation.
burning_hamster
Yeah, that was my initial thought, too. However, why was it only a short spike then? A dev branch that got merged into master by accident? Also, none of the projects that depend on my repo (as listed on github) have a lot of traction.
pkrotich
Set Google Alerts - someone probably posted a blog, tutorial or a course on network visualization and mentioned your software.
burning_hamster
Good idea. I just set that up. I did do some manual googling around but could not find anything.
Jugurtha
Same here with "bmc": https://pypi.org/project/bmc/, stats here: https://pypistats.org/packages/bmc

It's a MinIO admin Python wrapper we use for a product. There was a "won't fix" issue on MinIO's GitHub, and I wrote bmc to address that issue. People have been reaching out on Twitter or through the issue itself to know if they can use the library, and I put it on PyPI after that. It's super niche (solves one issue for a software that's not that common).

I've had conversations with some of its users as in "It's been months since you're using it and haven't heard of you", and they say that it's been working fine since then.