Packagist Package Scraper — PHP Package Metadata, Versions & Downloads

Extract comprehensive metadata for any PHP package hosted on Packagist, the official Composer package repository. This Actor fetches package details, version lists, maintainers, licensing, GitHub metrics, and download analytics directly from the Packagist JSON API, so you get clean structured data without scraping HTML.

Use Cases

• Vendor audits — Build a catalog of packages owned by a specific vendor or maintainer.
• Competitive research — Compare download counts, GitHub stars, and release velocity across PHP libraries.
• Dependency intelligence — Enrich package names with license, repository URL, and latest version data for SBOMs or internal registries.
• Lead generation — Identify popular packages by search keyword and rank them by downloads or favorites.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
packageNames	Array	No	Packagist names in vendor/package format (e.g., monolog/monolog).
searchQueries	Array	No	Keywords to search on Packagist (e.g., logger, framework).
maxItems	Number	No	Maximum packages to extract (default: 100, max: 1000).
includeVersions	Boolean	No	Include the full list of published versions (default: true).
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Built-in Apify proxy is included by default.

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset with one row per package:

{
  "name": "monolog/monolog",
  "description": "Sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services",
  "license": "MIT",
  "homepage": "",
  "repository": "https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog",
  "downloads": 1016340342,
  "monthlyDownloads": 16532992,
  "dailyDownloads": 581571,
  "favers": 22260,
  "version": "3.0.0",
  "versions": "3.0.0, 2.9.3, ...",
  "maintainers": "Seldaek",
  "type": "library",
  "language": "PHP",
  "dependents": 12345,
  "suggesters": 678,
  "githubStars": 20500,
  "githubForks": 1800,
  "githubOpenIssues": 42,
  "url": "https://packagist.org/packages/monolog/monolog",
  "error": ""
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per package extracted. You are charged only for successful package extractions; failed lookups and search result rows are not charged.

Limitations

• Packagist API may rate-limit very high-volume runs; the Actor retries each request up to 3 times.
• The repo.packagist.org/p/ metadata endpoint is not used because it blocks non-browser clients.
• Version lists can be long for mature packages; disable includeVersions if you only need the latest version.
• GitHub metrics are provided by Packagist and may not be available for every package.

FAQ

Q: Can I scrape all packages from a vendor?
A: Yes. Pass a list of packageNames in vendor/package format. To discover packages, combine searchQueries with the vendor name.

Q: Does this Actor require a proxy?
A: A proxy is included by default and recommended for production runs. You can override it in the input settings.

Q: Why am I seeing 0 downloads for some packages?
A: Download statistics are reported by Packagist. New or rarely used packages may have zero recorded downloads.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release. Package metadata, search, version lists, and download analytics from Packagist.

Support

Open an issue on this Actor's Apify page if you need help or want to request a feature.