I found a very handy package to get R package download information. The dlstats, from Guangchuang Yu.

The package is pretty easy to use, although I had some problems when queried multiple times. The plot functions work well.

Load required pacakges.

library("dlstats")
library("ggplot2")
library("scales")

Query CRAN pacakge and plot

plot_cran_stats(c("dplyr", "ggplot2", "scales"))+
    scale_y_continuous(labels = label_comma())+
    xlab("Time") +
    ylab("Number of download")

Query Bioconductor pacakge and plot

plot_bioc_stats(c("limma","DESeq2", "edgeR"))+
    scale_y_continuous(labels = label_comma())+
    xlab("Time") +
    ylab("Number of download")