Query npmjs registry via api

Question

I find I\'m often unsatisfied with the ordering and expressiveness of searches on https://www.npmjs.com/. I guess there should be a way to programmatically query the server

Answer 1

https://skimdb.npmjs.com/registry/_all_docs

This is a current method to pull all the package names.

The URL search is http://registry.npmjs.com/-/v1/search?text=<searchstring>&size=20

Answer 2

Of course there is at least one tool designed to talk to that registry, and that is the npm command line tool itself. Its search for example starts by updating a local cached copy of the index, filtering that. In update-index one can read that the URL ending in /-/all is apparently special. And indeed, appending that to registry.npmjs.org (deliberately not formatted as a link) will fetch a 125M file which might be too much for your browser. Luckily the cached version is stored available in ~/.npm/registry.npmjs.org/-/all/.cache.json. From there one can read a list of all nown packages. One could then continue to query each such package in more detail.

The fact that npm search apparently uses no more elaborate scheme suggests that there is not much of a server-side api here.

Searching the web for pages mentioning api.npmjs.org I found that the download counts can be retrieved from there. All other documents I found make use of that single facility.

Looking for alternatives, I also stumbled upon npmsearch.com which offers some more versatile searching facilities and has a somewhat documented API.

Answer 3

I know that this answer is old but some can still find it relevant so:

After a lot of searching, I finally found something, The solution doesn’t use NPM API because of its bad documentation and many more disadvantages that it has

(This will be helpful for other usages other than searching like getting a list of popular packages (what I needed))

The solution is to use Libraries.io

Libraries.io indexes data from 4,273,741 packages from 36 package managers. (Including NPM) From Libraries.io page

It has great API and good documentation, also it has some API wrapper in several languages

---

You can take a look at my CLI program that uses that library here

Answer 4

You can find the documentation for the official public NPM registry API at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/npm/registry

The documentation for the search endpoint can be found here: https://github.com/npm/registry/blob/master/docs/REGISTRY-API.md#get-v1search

The following query parameters are accepted: text, size, quality, popularity, maintenance

curl -sL 'https://registry.npmjs.org/-/v1/search?text=react-native&size=5' | jq

Here we're using curl to make the API request, and jq to format the JSON response. The following output is returned:

{
  "objects": [
    {
      "package": {
        "name": "react-native",
        "scope": "unscoped",
        "version": "0.62.2",
        "description": "A framework for building native apps using React",
        "date": "2020-04-08T17:08:19.985Z",
        "links": {
          "npm": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native",
          "homepage": "https://github.com/facebook/react-native#readme",
          "repository": "https://github.com/facebook/react-native",
          "bugs": "https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues"
        },
        "publisher": {
          "username": "react-native-bot",
          "email": "opensource+react-native-bot@fb.com"
        },
        "maintainers": [
          {
            "username": "cpojer",
            "email": "christoph.pojer@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "fb",
            "email": "opensource+npm@fb.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "grabbou",
            "email": "grabbou@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "hectorramos",
            "email": "hector@hectorramos.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "react-native-bot",
            "email": "opensource+react-native-bot@fb.com"
          }
        ]
      },
      "flags": {
        "unstable": true
      },
      "score": {
        "final": 0.4604636166574407,
        "detail": {
          "quality": 0.5886895871400879,
          "popularity": 0.47768592528213616,
          "maintenance": 0.3333333333333333
        }
      },
      "searchScore": 100000.47
    },
    {
      "package": {
        "name": "react-native-svg",
        "scope": "unscoped",
        "version": "12.1.0",
        "description": "SVG library for react-native",
        "keywords": [
          "react-component",
          "react-native",
          "ios",
          "android",
          "SVG",
          "ART",
          "VML",
          "gradient"
        ],
        "date": "2020-04-09T23:50:28.358Z",
        "links": {
          "npm": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-svg",
          "homepage": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-svg",
          "repository": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-svg",
          "bugs": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-svg/issues"
        },
        "publisher": {
          "username": "msand",
          "email": "msand@abo.fi"
        },
        "maintainers": [
          {
            "username": "brentvatne",
            "email": "brentvatne@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "dustin.savery",
            "email": "dustin.savery@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "magicismight",
            "email": "master@horcrux.cn"
          },
          {
            "username": "msand",
            "email": "msand@abo.fi"
          }
        ]
      },
      "score": {
        "final": 0.5244501419238121,
        "detail": {
          "quality": 0.9582364654638059,
          "popularity": 0.34375010176572474,
          "maintenance": 0.3333333333333333
        }
      },
      "searchScore": 0.031369504
    },
    {
      "package": {
        "name": "react-native-device-info",
        "scope": "unscoped",
        "version": "5.6.1",
        "description": "Get device information using react-native",
        "keywords": [
          "react-component",
          "react-native",
          "ios",
          "android",
          "windows",
          "device",
          "events",
          "cocoapod"
        ],
        "date": "2020-05-27T18:33:11.715Z",
        "links": {
          "npm": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-device-info",
          "homepage": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-device-info#readme",
          "repository": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-device-info",
          "bugs": "https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-device-info/issues"
        },
        "author": {
          "name": "Rebecca Hughes",
          "email": "rebecca@learnium.net",
          "url": "https://github.com/rebeccahughes"
        },
        "publisher": {
          "username": "mikehardy",
          "email": "npmjs@mikehardy.net"
        },
        "maintainers": [
          {
            "username": "gantman",
            "email": "gantman+npm@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "jeroenbourgois",
            "email": "info@jeroenbourgois.be"
          },
          {
            "username": "lilach",
            "email": "i.am.red@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "machour",
            "email": "machour@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "rebeccahughes",
            "email": "rebeccahughes1@outlook.com"
          }
        ]
      },
      "score": {
        "final": 0.5102794746987024,
        "detail": {
          "quality": 0.9614895473985808,
          "popularity": 0.3004741251784613,
          "maintenance": 0.3333333333333333
        }
      },
      "searchScore": 0.016712856
    },
    {
      "package": {
        "name": "css-to-react-native",
        "scope": "unscoped",
        "version": "3.0.0",
        "description": "Convert CSS text to a React Native stylesheet object",
        "keywords": [
          "styled-components",
          "React",
          "ReactNative",
          "styles",
          "CSS"
        ],
        "date": "2019-10-10T17:46:00.297Z",
        "links": {
          "npm": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/css-to-react-native",
          "homepage": "https://github.com/styled-components/css-to-react-native#readme",
          "repository": "https://github.com/styled-components/css-to-react-native",
          "bugs": "https://github.com/styled-components/css-to-react-native/issues"
        },
        "author": {
          "name": "Jacob Parker"
        },
        "publisher": {
          "username": "jacobp100",
          "email": "jacobparker1992@gmail.com"
        },
        "maintainers": [
          {
            "username": "jacobp100",
            "email": "jacobparker1992@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "kristerkari",
            "email": "krister@sent.at"
          },
          {
            "username": "mxstbr",
            "email": "npm@mxstbr.com"
          }
        ]
      },
      "score": {
        "final": 0.4836548888489432,
        "detail": {
          "quality": 0.8524860977159072,
          "popularity": 0.39264581380833835,
          "maintenance": 0.25852292771786467
        }
      },
      "searchScore": 0.013077582
    },
    {
      "package": {
        "name": "react-native-elements",
        "scope": "unscoped",
        "version": "2.0.4",
        "description": "React Native Elements & UI Toolkit",
        "keywords": [
          "react-native",
          "reactjs",
          "reactnative",
          "bootstrap"
        ],
        "date": "2020-06-30T02:30:34.882Z",
        "links": {
          "npm": "https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-elements",
          "homepage": "https://react-native-elements.github.io/react-native-elements/",
          "repository": "https://github.com/react-native-elements/react-native-elements",
          "bugs": "https://github.com/react-native-elements/react-native-elements/issues"
        },
        "author": {
          "name": "Nader Dabit & Monte Thakkar"
        },
        "publisher": {
          "username": "flyingcircle",
          "email": "jeremyelijah@live.com"
        },
        "maintainers": [
          {
            "username": "dabit3",
            "email": "dabit3@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "iroachie",
            "email": "kroach.work@gmail.com"
          },
          {
            "username": "monte9",
            "email": "mthakkar@mail.sfsu.edu"
          }
        ]
      },
      "score": {
        "final": 0.4921277780507845,
        "detail": {
          "quality": 0.9218028296308819,
          "popularity": 0.28262932141386665,
          "maintenance": 0.3333333333333333
        }
      },
      "searchScore": 0.011005878
    }
  ],
  "total": 26290,
  "time": "Wed Jul 08 2020 05:02:14 GMT+0000 (UTC)"
}