Cheerio's release frequency is highly variable. Initial development (2011-2014) saw frequent releases, including a burst of activity in late 2011. Releases became sporadic after 2016, with long periods of inactivity. A version 1.0.0 was released in August 2024, followed by releases in June and July of 2025, then no releases in August or September 2025.
Cheerio's npm downloads show a general upward trend from March 2024 to July 2025, peaking at over 55 million. August 2025 saw a slight decrease, and September 2025, being incomplete, shows significantly lower downloads. Overall, the package has experienced substantial growth in popularity.
Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It parses HTML and XML documents, providing a simple API for traversing, manipulating, and rendering them. It's perfect for web scraping, data extraction, and server-side HTML processing where a full browser environment isn't required. Cheerio offers a familiar jQuery-like syntax, making it easy to work with existing jQuery knowledge while providing significant performance benefits in Node.js.