Packagist PHP package scraper

Pull structured data on any PHP package from Packagist, the main Composer registry. Search by keyword, grab the most popular packages, or look up exact packages by name. Every result comes back as a clean row with download counts, GitHub stars, dependents, maintainers, the latest version, license and dependencies.

The actor reads the public Packagist API. No login, no API key, no proxy.

What you can do with it

• Find packages in a niche and rank them by real usage (total, monthly and daily installs).
• Map an ecosystem: pull every symfony-bundle or laravel package with its stars, dependents and maintainers.
• Audit dependencies: fetch exact vendor/name packages and read their required PHP version, license and requires list.
• Spot abandoned packages and their suggested replacements before you adopt them.
• Build datasets for package discovery tools, dependency dashboards, or market research on the PHP ecosystem.

Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Keywords to search Packagist for, such as laravel, pdf, logging.
packageNames	array	Exact packages in vendor/name form, such as monolog/monolog.
tags	array	Optional Packagist tags to search, such as orm, cache.
type	string	Optional package type filter, such as library, symfony-bundle.
includePopular	boolean	Also add the most downloaded packages on Packagist.
fetchDetails	boolean	Fetch full metadata per package. On by default.
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of packages to return. Default 100.

If you leave every discovery field empty, the actor returns the most popular packages so a run always has data.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["laravel", "pdf"],
  "includePopular": false,
  "fetchDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

One row per package. Fields include:

name, vendor, shortName, description, type, language, repository, packagistUrl, downloadsTotal, downloadsMonthly, downloadsDaily, favers, githubStars, githubForks, githubOpenIssues, dependents, suggesters, maintainers, latestVersion, latestVersionTime, license, requiresPhp, requires, keywords, homepage, authors, abandoned, abandonedReplacement.

Example record

{
  "name": "monolog/monolog",
  "vendor": "monolog",
  "description": "Sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services",
  "repository": "https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog",
  "downloadsTotal": 1028928538,
  "downloadsMonthly": 16637321,
  "githubStars": 21395,
  "dependents": 8404,
  "latestVersion": "3.9.0",
  "license": "MIT",
  "requiresPhp": ">=8.1",
  "maintainers": ["Seldaek"]
}

Notes

Data comes from the public Packagist API and reflects what the registry publishes. Download counts, stars and dependents update as Packagist updates them. The actor paginates search results, retries transient errors, and caps output at maxItems.