In a previous post, I was trying to parse out the most popular Composer packages, and wasn’t able to find a way to get the information through any kind of API. I ended up doing a simple scrape, but then I started searching through the Packagist code ,  and I found some interesting gems.

First, is a list of ALL the packages: https://packagist.org/packages/list.json . It produces a simple list of all 7002 (at the moment) packages in json.

{
    "packageNames": [
        "illuminate/auth",
        "illuminate/cache",
        "illuminate/config",
        "illuminate/console",
        "illuminate/container",
        "illuminate/cookie",
        "illuminate/database",
        "illuminate/encryption",
        "illuminate/events",
        "illuminate/exception",
        "illuminate/filesystem",
        "illuminate/foundation",
        "illuminate/hashing",
        "illuminate/http",
        "illuminate/log",
        "illuminate/mail",
        "illuminate/pagination",
        "illuminate/queue",
        "illuminate/redis",
        "illuminate/routing",
        "illuminate/session",
        "illuminate/socialite",
        "illuminate/support",
        "illuminate/translation",
        "illuminate/validation",
        "illuminate/view",
        "illuminate/workbench",
    ]
}

With that list, you could easily get the specifics about each package at https://packagist.org/p/{package-name}.json. For example: https://packagist.org/p/illuminate/database.json . But what about searching? The Packagist website UI isn’t the most intuitive, but there a couple of queries that make the search fairly powerful. First, is just a regular search like : https://packagist.org/search.json?q=laravel This is fine. It mirrors the site’s search and it’s nice that it includes the ‘downloads’ and ‘favers’

{
    "results": [
        {
            "name": "laravel/framework",
            "description": "The Laravel Framework.",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/laravel/framework",
            "downloads": 6493,
            "favers": 4
        },
        {
            "name": "laravel/curl",
            "description": "Laravel Curl Helper Library inspired by Phil",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/laravel/curl",
            "downloads": 87,
            "favers": 0
        },
    ],
    "total": 77,
    "next": "https://packagist.org/search.json?q=laravel&page=2"
}

But we can get even fancier and search the tags as well: https://packagist.org/search.json?tags=laravel

{
    "results": [
        {
            "name": "laravel/framework",
            "description": "The Laravel Framework.",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/laravel/framework",
            "downloads": 6493,
            "favers": 4
        },
        {
            "name": "composer/installers",
            "description": "A multi-framework Composer library installer",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/composer/installers",
            "downloads": 5562,
            "favers": 2
        },
        {
            "name": "cartalyst/sentry",
            "description": "PHP 5.3+ fully-featured authentication & authorization system",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/cartalyst/sentry",
            "downloads": 731,
            "favers": 2
        },
        {
            "name": "illuminate/database",
            "description": "An elegant database abstraction library.",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/illuminate/database",
            "downloads": 10787,
            "favers": 1
        }
    ],
    "total": 60,
    "next": "https://packagist.org/search.json?page=2&tags%5B0%5D=laravel"
}

Let’s say we only want packages that are tagged with “laravel” AND “database”. That’s possible, too: https://packagist.org/search.json?tags[]=laravel&tags[]=database

{
    "results": [
        {
            "name": "illuminate/database",
            "description": "An elegant database abstraction library.",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/illuminate/database",
            "downloads": 10787,
            "favers": 1
        },
        {
            "name": "laravelbook/ardent",
            "description": "Self-validating smart models for Laravel 4's Eloquent O/RM",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/laravelbook/ardent",
            "downloads": 69,
            "favers": 1
        },
        {
            "name": "jtgrimes/laravelodbc",
            "description": "Adds an ODBC driver to Laravel4",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/jtgrimes/laravelodbc",
            "downloads": 5,
            "favers": 0
        },
        {
            "name": "dhorrigan/capsule",
            "description": "A simple wrapper class for the Laravel Database package.  This is only to be used outside of a Laravel application.",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/dhorrigan/capsule",
            "downloads": 79,
            "favers": 0
        },
        {
            "name": "iyoworks/elegant",
            "description": "",
            "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/iyoworks/elegant",
            "downloads": 12,
            "favers": 0
        }
    ],
    "total": 5
}

You can also search for a “type”, like https://packagist.org/search.json?type=symfony-module or even mix the queries like so: https://packagist.org/search.json/?q=laravel&tags[]=orm&tags[]=database

Other interesting ways to view the data can be found at: https://packagist.org/packages.json … so if you wanted to view packages only released in January of 2013, you can use: https://packagist.org/p/packages-2013-01.json

My favorite “hack”, is searching with an empty value like so: https://packagist.org/search.json?page=1&q= … which returns all the records (15 on a page), ordered by popularity.

One of these days, if someone else doesn’t beat me to it, I’ll make a review/upvote/downvote site so that the best packages can be found a bit easier. Also, there are some excellent packages that have almost no documentation… so having comments that explain some use-cases would be nice.