Popularity of Hex packages?

That is an interesting question! To re-render your question, you’re basically asking for the library with the most transitive dependencies yea? I expect downloads is a pretty good proxy for that but as you say, it is a slightly different question.

I ran this query:

SELECT dependencies.name, count(packages.id)
FROM packages
JOIN (
	SELECT package_id, max(inserted_at)
	FROM releases
	GROUP BY package_id
) latest_releases ON packages.id = latest_releases.package_id
JOIN releases ON releases.package_id = latest_releases.package_id AND releases.inserted_at = latest_releases.max
JOIN requirements ON requirements.release_id = releases.id
JOIN packages AS dependencies ON dependencies.id = requirements.dependency_id
WHERE dependencies.repository_id = 1
GROUP BY dependencies.id
ORDER BY count(packages.id) DESC;

It counts the number of packages where the the most recent version has a direct dependency on a given package, note that it does not count transitive dependencies.

The results for the top 100 packages are:

If anyone wants to productionize this and make it available on hex.pm contributions would be very welcome.

Thanks. I’m not surprised that Jason is #1 (but I was expecting ex_doc), or by the success of Phoenix-related stuff. I’m more surprised by the absence of dialyxir.

Both ex_doc and dialyxir are dependencies used in dev so they wouldn’t show up as Hex dependencies.