189 Billion Packagist Installs
Since April 2012, Composer packages have been installed 188,970,181,560 times. That's 189 billion. Not downloads of Composer itself — installs of PHP packages, in real projects, by real developers.
189B
Total installs
459,748
Packages
5.7M
Package versions
Packagist is the 3rd largest package registry in any language, behind only npm and PyPI:
| Registry | Language | Packages |
|---|---|---|
| npm | JavaScript | ~3,100,000 |
| PyPI | Python | ~741,000 |
| Packagist | PHP | ~460,000 |
| crates.io | Rust | ~300,000 |
| RubyGems | Ruby | ~175,000 |
Source: Packagist.org statistics, July 2026 · crates.io API, July 2026
This isn't bloat — these are production installs driven by Composer's dependency resolver. Every composer install in a CI pipeline, every deployment, every local dev setup counts. 189 billion means PHP's package ecosystem is not just alive — it's one of the most active in software engineering.
Significance: Ecosystem Health
An ecosystem's health isn't measured by how many packages exist — it's measured by how many are actually used. 189 billion installs across 460K packages means the average PHP package gets real adoption. Composer's strict semantic versioning and deterministic lockfiles make this ecosystem uniquely reliable.