WP Composer: A Faster Composer Repository for WordPress

For over a decade, WPackagist has been the default way to install WordPress plugins and themes with Composer. It worked, but it was slow — and earlier this month it was acquired by WP Engine, a private equity-backed company.

We’ve been building open source WordPress tools at Roots since 2011. Our roots/wordpress Composer package has nearly 20 million downloads, and a large portion of the modern WordPress Composer workflow already runs through Roots tooling. Building a Composer repository felt like a natural next step.

So we built WP Composer — an independent, open source Composer repository for WordPress plugins and themes.

Why it’s faster

WPackagist uses Composer’s older provider-includes protocol, which forces Composer to download large index files containing metadata for thousands of packages before it can resolve your dependencies.

WP Composer uses Composer v2’s metadata-url protocol, which lets Composer fetch metadata for only the packages it needs.

Cold resolve, no cache.

What else is different

• Update frequency — packages update every 5 minutes (WPackagist is ~1.5 hours)
• Package metadata — includes author, description, homepage, and support links (WPackagist has been missing these since a 2020 feature request)
• Cleaner naming — wp-plugin/* and wp-theme/* instead of wpackagist-plugin/*
• CDN-cached — metadata is served from Cloudflare R2/CDN
• Fully open source — the entire project including deployment config is on GitHub

Switching

Replace the WPackagist repository in your composer.json:

{
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "composer",
      "url": "https://repo.wp-composer.com"
    }
  ]
}

Then update your package names from wpackagist-plugin/* to wp-plugin/* and wpackagist-theme/* to wp-theme/*. There’s also a migration script in our GitHub repo that handles this automatically.

How it’s built

WP Composer is a single Go binary backed by SQLite. A pipeline runs every 5 minutes that discovers packages from the WordPress.org SVN repository, fetches metadata from the WordPress.org API, and builds Composer metadata files that get deployed to Cloudflare R2.

The project is community-funded through GitHub Sponsors.

Full comparison: WP Composer vs WPackagist