MELPA Scraper

Scrape MELPA — Milkypostman's Emacs Lisp Package Archive, the largest community package repository for GNU Emacs with 6,000+ packages. Search or browse the full catalog, or fetch specific packages by exact name. Get versions, descriptions, dependencies, keywords, maintainers, source-repo links, and cumulative download counts. Pure HTTP against MELPA's public JSON archives — no auth, no proxy, no cookies.

What this actor does

• Two modes: search (free-text query or full browse) and byNames (exact package lookup)
• Two channels: melpa (rolling, ~6,270 packages, rebuilt continuously) and melpa-stable (~3,430 packages, built only from tagged releases, semantic versions)
• Filters: minimum downloads, source host (GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg/SourceHut/Git/Mercurial), keyword substring, last-updated date range, reverse-dependency lookup (dependsOn — find every package that depends on a given library)
• Sorting: by download count, name, or most-recently-updated
• Empty fields are omitted — you only ever see fields with real data

Output per package

• name — package name (e.g. magit)
• channel — melpa or melpa-stable
• version — MELPA snapshot version (YYYYMMDD.HHMM on melpa; semantic version like 4.7.0 on melpa-stable)
• description
• packageType — tar (multi-file) or single
• keywords[]
• authors[], maintainers[], primaryMaintainer
• dependencies[] — {name, minVersion} pairs
• fetcher — source host (github, gitlab, codeberg, sourcehut, git, hg)
• repo — owner/repo (when the host uses that form)
• branch — the tracked git branch, when the recipe pins one
• oldNames[] — previous package name(s), for packages that were renamed
• repoUrl — canonical source-code repository URL
• commit, revisionDescription
• downloadCount — cumulative MELPA installs
• lastUpdatedDate — ISO date of the latest build (only on melpa; melpa-stable versions are tag-derived and don't map to a build date, so this is omitted there)
• sourceUrl — the package's MELPA page
• recordType: "package", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	search / byNames
channel	string	melpa	melpa (rolling) / melpa-stable (tagged releases only)
searchQuery	string	–	Free-text query against name/description/keywords (mode=search)
names	array	–	Exact package names (mode=byNames)
fetcher	string	–	Filter by source host
minDownloads	int	–	Minimum cumulative downloads
containsKeyword	string	–	Substring match on name/description/keywords
dependsOn	string	–	Only packages that declare this exact package name as a dependency (e.g. dash)
updatedAfter / updatedBefore	string	–	ISO date range on last update (mode=search, melpa channel only)
sortBy	string	downloads	downloads / name / recentlyUpdated
maxItems	int	50	Hard cap (1–5000)

Example: popular GitHub-hosted packages tagged "completion"

{
  "mode": "search",
  "containsKeyword": "completion",
  "fetcher": "github",
  "minDownloads": 10000,
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example: lookup by exact names

{
  "mode": "byNames",
  "names": ["magit", "company", "flycheck", "projectile"]
}

Example: what depends on dash?

{
  "mode": "search",
  "dependsOn": "dash",
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example: browse only stable (tagged-release) packages

{
  "mode": "search",
  "channel": "melpa-stable",
  "searchQuery": "completion",
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Use cases

• Track the most-downloaded Emacs packages over time
• Build a dependency graph across the MELPA ecosystem
• Audit which packages are hosted on which forge (GitHub vs GitLab vs self-hosted git)
• Monitor recently-updated packages for a curated Emacs starter-kit

FAQ

Does this require a MELPA account or API key? No — MELPA publishes its full catalog as public JSON with no authentication.

How current is the data? MELPA rebuilds its archive continuously from each package's source repository; this actor reads the live archive.json/recipes.json/download_counts.json on every run.

Can I get every package in one run? Yes — leave searchQuery blank and set maxItems to 5000 (there are currently ~6,270 packages on melpa, ~3,430 on melpa-stable).

What's the difference between melpa and melpa-stable? melpa rebuilds continuously from each package's default branch, so versions are snapshot-dated (YYYYMMDD.HHMM) and can change several times a day. melpa-stable only rebuilds when a maintainer pushes a git tag, so versions look like conventional semantic versions (e.g. 4.7.0) and change far less often — pick this channel if you want fewer, more conservative releases. Not every melpa package has a tagged release, so melpa-stable has fewer packages overall.