WP Packages emerges as independent open source alternative post-acquisition

On March 12, WP Engine acquired WPackagist, raising concerns within the WordPress developer community about the implications of corporate control over essential open-source infrastructure. In response, WP Packages, formerly known as WP Composer, was launched just four days later as a community-funded, independent alternative offering additional features.

Developed by Ben Word from Roots, the team behind Bedrock, Sage, and Trellis, WP Packages is an open-source Composer repository for WordPress plugins and themes. Composer, the PHP dependency manager, is widely used by professional WordPress developers for installing and updating plugins and themes. WP Packages provides access to every free plugin and theme available in the WordPress.org directory, and users can easily transition from WPackagist with a simple script or a few terminal commands.

The significance of the transition

WPackagist, established in 2013 by the UK-based digital cooperative Outlandish, served the WordPress Composer ecosystem for over a decade. However, in recent years, it faced challenges such as deferred maintenance and slow update cycles. The acquisition by WP Engine—a private-equity-backed corporation—prompted concerns about the future control of this critical infrastructure. WP Engine’s immediate update to display a “WPackagist is now maintained by WP Engine” notice in developers’ terminals highlighted the shift in ownership dynamics.

Ben Word had already begun developing a replacement for WPackagist prior to the acquisition announcement. Following the deal, he expedited the launch, unveiling WP Packages on March 16 as a fully open-source repository hosted on GitHub.

WP Packages distinguishes itself by offering a more efficient tool. It supports Composer v2’s metadata-url protocol, allowing for faster metadata fetching specific to project needs, whereas WPackagist still uses the older provider-includes method. This results in significantly faster cold dependency resolution on WP Packages—0.7 seconds for 10 plugins compared to 12.3 seconds on WPackagist.

Additionally, WP Packages employs CDN caching with public cache headers and serves immutable, content-addressed per-package files. It offers cleaner package naming conventions, includes metadata such as authors and descriptions, and provides updates every five minutes, compared to WPackagist’s roughly 90-minute cycle.

Transitioning to WP Packages

Switching from WPackagist to WP Packages involves a few terminal commands:

• Remove existing WPackagist packages: composer remove wpackagist-theme/twentytwentyfive
• Remove the WPackagist repository and add WP Packages: composer config --unset repositories.wpackagist && composer config repositories.wp-composer composer https://repo.wp-packages.org
• Require packages with the new naming: composer require wp-theme/twentytwentyfive

Alternatively, a migration script is available to automatically update your composer.json.

WP Packages is fully public, with its application code, documentation, and Ansible deployment configuration accessible on GitHub. Ben Word has assured that WP Packages will not use the Composer info field for promotional messages, maintaining its community-driven ethos.

Supported by GitHub Sponsors, including Carrot, Kinsta, WordPress.com, and Itineris, WP Packages exemplifies the strength of the WordPress ecosystem when the community collaborates to build open-source tools. Ben Word anticipated the need for a superior solution and delivered it without corporate constraints, showcasing the power of open-source development.