Ioanni Mitsakis January 11th, 2017

Libraries.io: New Search Engine for Open Source Projects

Libraries.io is a new project for web designers and developers. It helps you stay on top of libraries, modules, and frameworks from the open source ocean.

Libraries.io: Landing Page. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Nimble Search Engine Ignores Platform Borders

Libraries.io is growing quickly. By now, it already has more than two million open source projects in its portfolio, and it continues to grow steadily. The service integrates itself into almost three dozens of different package managers. Accordingly, the projects can also be filtered by these package managers.

As you'd expect from a search engine, Libraries.io also lets you search free text keywords. However, it may be more efficient to directly search for the license, or a programming language in conjunction with a license.

In this example, you're searching for JavaScript projects that are distributed under the MIT license. This example gets you all WordPress projects in PHP under the GPL v2. I guess you get the idea?

Libraries.io: Search Result Page. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Libraries.io: Close Connection to Github

Libraries.io also latches onto Github. This begins with you being able to log into Libraries.io using your Github account. On some of the detail pages for respective projects, you'll find Github statistics, and you'll always find links to the repository, as well as other important information and links regarding the project. Speaking of an extensive all-round information is not an exaggeration.

Logging in with your Github account also gives you the advantage of being able to follow projects directly on Libraries.io. If you do that, you'll be kept up to date with news on the projects you chose. This also works for platforms that don't offer this functionality on their own. The integration with Github also makes sure that the lists of the most popular projects are calculated based on their respective Github status, meaning the number of stars and contributors.

The service provides its own API. So if you wanted to create an app based on the data from Libraries.io, you could do so.

Using the service is free.

Featured photo credit: Pxhere under CC0

Ioanni Mitsakis

Ioanni Mitsakis is front-end developer at a major European automotive supplier and responsible for the look & feel of their internal cloud-based apps. As his employer works internationally with distributed teams world-wide, a rock-solid development foundation is what Ioanni aims for. He better should ;-)

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