# Winget Package Search

> Searchable package metadata extracted daily from microsoft/winget-pkgs.

Canonical site: https://solrevdev.com/winget-search/
Package catalog: https://solrevdev.com/winget-search/packages.json
Human query guide: https://solrevdev.com/winget-search/agent-access.html
Source repository: https://github.com/solrevdev/winget-search

## Important behavior

The website is a static JavaScript application hosted on GitHub Pages. A URL such as
`/?q=nssm` returns the application HTML; search results are rendered in the browser.
Non-browser agents should download `packages.json` and query it locally.

## Catalog shape

The JSON document contains:

- `metadata.total`: package count
- `metadata.extracted_at`: extraction timestamp
- `metadata.source`: upstream source
- `packages`: array of package records

Package fields are `id`, `name`, `description`, `publisher`, `version`,
`shortDescription`, `tags`, `homepage`, and `license`. Some values may be null.

Use the exact package ID to construct an install command:

`winget install -e --id <PACKAGE_ID>`

## Query examples

macOS/Linux with curl and jq:

```sh
curl -fsSL https://solrevdev.com/winget-search/packages.json -o packages.json
query='nssm'
jq --arg q "$query" '
  .packages
  | map(select(
      [.id, .name, .publisher, .description, ((.tags // []) | join(" "))]
      | map(. // "")
      | join(" ")
      | ascii_downcase
      | contains($q | ascii_downcase)
    ))
  | .[:10]
  | map({id, name, version, publisher})
' packages.json
```

Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7+:

```powershell
$catalog = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'https://solrevdev.com/winget-search/packages.json'
$query = 'nssm'
$catalog.packages |
  Where-Object {
    $text = (@($_.id, $_.name, $_.publisher, $_.description) + @($_.tags) |
      Where-Object { $_ } |
      ForEach-Object { [string]$_ }) -join ' '
    $text.IndexOf($query, [System.StringComparison]::OrdinalIgnoreCase) -ge 0
  } |
  Select-Object -First 10 id, name, version, publisher
```

Download the catalog once and reuse it when performing several searches.