Hackage Scraper — Haskell Package Metadata & Dependencies

Extract comprehensive metadata for Haskell packages from Hackage, the central package archive for the Haskell community. This Actor retrieves package names, versions, synopses, descriptions, licenses, authors, maintainers, categories, tags, and deprecation status.

Use Cases

• Package Discovery — Browse and filter Haskell packages by category, license, or tags to find libraries for your project.
• Dependency Analysis — Audit package metadata, licenses, and deprecation status to ensure compliance and avoid unmaintained dependencies.
• Ecosystem Monitoring — Track new releases, deprecated packages, and trending libraries in the Haskell ecosystem.
• Academic Research — Collect structured metadata about Haskell packages for software engineering research and analysis.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
packageNames	Array	No	List of Hackage package names to scrape. Leave empty to scrape all packages.
maxItems	Number	No	Maximum packages to scrape (default: 100, max: 5000).
includeDetails	Boolean	No	Include full metadata (synopsis, description, license, etc.) (default: true).
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy configuration for requests.

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset with the following fields:

{
  "packageName": "Cabal",
  "version": "3.16.1.0",
  "synopsis": "A framework for packaging Haskell software",
  "description": "The Haskell Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries...",
  "license": "BSD-3-Clause",
  "author": "Cabal Development Team",
  "maintainer": "cabal-devel@haskell.org",
  "category": "Distribution",
  "homepage": "http://www.haskell.org/cabal/",
  "bugReports": "https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues",
  "url": "https://hackage.haskell.org/package/Cabal",
  "tags": ["bsd3", "distribution", "library"],
  "versionsCount": 5,
  "latestVersion": "3.16.1.0",
  "deprecated": false
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per package extracted. Proxy usage is included by default.

Limitations

• Large full-catalog scrapes (20,000+ packages) may take significant time. Use maxItems to limit scope.
• Package metadata is sourced from Hackage HTML pages; structural changes may affect extraction.
• Very new or removed packages may not have complete metadata.

FAQ

Q: Can I scrape all Hackage packages at once? A: Yes. Leave packageNames empty and set maxItems to 0 (unlimited). Be aware this will process over 20,000 packages.

Q: How do I find packages by category? A: Scrape all packages and filter the output dataset by the category field.

Q: What happens if a package is deprecated? A: The deprecated field will be set to true and the latestVersion will reflect the latest available version.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release