Laravel CRO Open Services

A small Laravel SDK for Ireland's CRO Open Services API, the Companies Registration Office REST API for company and submission data.

It gives you an HTTP client, a container binding and a facade for the public endpoints under /cws.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+ (CI tests 8.2 to 8.5)
• Laravel 10, 11, 12 or 13
• CRO Open Services credentials (an email and API key from https://services.cro.ie/)

Install

composer require codeitamarjr/laravel-cro-open-services

The service provider and the CroOpenServices facade are registered automatically.

Configuration

Add your credentials to .env:

CRO_EMAIL=you@example.com
CRO_API_KEY=your-key

Each setting checks these variables in order and uses the first one that is set:

To change how the config reads them, publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=cro-open-services-config

The client does not check the credentials for you. Check them yourself before calling the API:

$configured = filled(config('cro-open-services.email')) && filled(config('cro-open-services.key'));

Usage

Inject the client or use the facade:

use Codeitamarjr\LaravelCroOpenServices\CroOpenServicesClient;
use Codeitamarjr\LaravelCroOpenServices\Facades\CroOpenServices;

public function show(CroOpenServicesClient $cro)
{
    $companies = $cro->searchCompaniesByNumber('83740');
    $matches = $cro->searchCompaniesByName('ryanair');
    $count = $cro->getCompanyCount(['company_name' => 'smith']);
}

$company = CroOpenServices::getCompany('83740');
$submissions = CroOpenServices::getCompanySubmissions('83740');
$submission = CroOpenServices::getSubmission('6191121', '2');

Methods

Notes:

• $busInd is the company/business indicator: C for a company, B for a business name. It is case-insensitive.
• format=json is added to every request. Parameters with null or empty-string values are left out.
• Any other CRO query parameter (skip, max, sortBy, htmlEnc, …) can be passed in $params.
• An empty or non-JSON success response is returned as [] (or 0 for the count methods).

Error handling

Every method calls ->throw(), so any non-2xx response from CRO (bad credentials, not found, server error) throws Illuminate\Http\Client\RequestException. Connection failures and timeouts throw Illuminate\Http\Client\ConnectionException. Catch them wherever a CRO outage shouldn't break your page or job:

use Illuminate\Http\Client\ConnectionException;
use Illuminate\Http\Client\RequestException;

try {
    $company = CroOpenServices::getCompany($number);
} catch (RequestException|ConnectionException $exception) {
    report($exception);

    $company = null;
}

Requests time out after 15 seconds (5 seconds to connect).

Rate limits

CRO is behind Cloudflare, which rate-limits with HTTP 429 or the body error code: 1015.

searchSubmissionsByCompanyNumber() handles this for you. It logs a warning, sleeps 10 seconds and retries, up to 3 times per page, then throws. It also waits 750 ms between pages. The other methods don't retry, so a rate-limited request throws straight away.

Testing your app

The client uses Laravel's HTTP client, so fake it in your tests with Http::fake():

Http::fake([
    'https://services.cro.ie/cws/company/83740/c*' => Http::response(['company_num' => 83740, 'company_name' => 'FOSTER WHEELER IRELAND LIMITED']),
]);

Developing the package

composer install
composer test

To run the live smoke test against the real API:

export CRO_EMAIL=you@example.com
export CRO_API_KEY=your-key
composer test:live

Without exported credentials, the live test uses CRO's public test credentials. It checks the documented examples (company 83740, name search ryanair, counts, submission search and one submission document).

Scope

This package only covers CRO Open Services. It doesn't scrape CORE pages or download paid documents.

License

MIT