Finding ideas on Packagist

Part 1, chapter 10. Packagist is the public index Composer reads. Every extension that can be installed with composer require is listed there, with its versions, its requirements and its license. For someone looking for ideas it is a second catalogue, organized by package rather than by repository.

The extension package type #

Composer packages say what they are with a type. Extensions for this code base use the type ezpublish-legacy-extension; the installer package (se7enxweb/exponential-legacy-installer) recognizes that type and puts the package into extension/<name> instead of vendor/. The name of the folder comes from extra.ezpublish-legacy-extension-name in the package's composer.json, for example:

{
    "name": "se7enxweb/str_replace",
    "type": "ezpublish-legacy-extension",
    "license": "GPL-2.0-or-later",
    "extra": {
        "ezpublish-legacy-extension-name": "str_replace"
    }
}

List every extension package #

Packagist has a listing by type. In a browser: packagist.org/packages/list.json?type=ezpublish-legacy-extension. From a terminal:

curl -s 'https://packagist.org/packages/list.json?type=ezpublish-legacy-extension' | grep -o '"[^"]*/[^"]*"' | wc -l
curl -s 'https://packagist.org/packages/list.json?vendor=se7enxweb' | grep -o '"se7enxweb/[^"]*"'

When this page was written (October 2026), Packagist listed 398 packages of the extension type, 127 of them under the se7enxweb vendor, and 218 packages under se7enxweb in total (the rest are libraries, distributions and bundles). The numbers change; run the commands for today's.

Read a package #

The page https://packagist.org/packages/<vendor>/<name> shows, for each version:

The same as JSON, which is useful in scripts:

curl -s https://packagist.org/packages/se7enxweb/eztags.json | head -c 600

From an installation, Composer shows what it knows about an installed package:

composer show se7enxweb/eztags
composer show --all se7enxweb/eztags | head -30

Versions you can trust #

A version on Packagist comes from a Git tag. A tag, once Packagist has read it, is never read again, so a version number means the same code forever. This is why the projects behind these packages never move a tag and publish a new version instead (see Tags and releases are permanent).

When a newer tag exists on GitHub but Packagist does not show it, the repository's webhook to Packagist is usually missing; The Packagist webhook explains how to check.

Install one on your development installation #

composer require se7enxweb/<name>

Composer puts the package into extension/<name>. That does not switch it on: activate it as described in Extensions: find, install, configure, build and release, regenerate the autoloads and clear the caches. Some extensions need more (a database table, a content class); their README says so.

Packagist versus GitHub #

Related pages #

• Previous: Finding ideas on GitHub
• Next: Share Exponential (share.exponential.earth)
• composer.json for an extension
• Composer and Packagist
• Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.

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