Company Info

Lookup company information from public services.

If your app needs information about a given company, then there are public service API's that can provide that information. It can be a lot of work implementing support for each different service, especially if you need it for several different countries.

The Company Info package provides a service that wraps the public services and gives you a simple way to perform the lookups.

Currently the package supports the public service API's of the Danish VIRK and CVR API services and the GB Gazette service.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require worksome/company-info

You can publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="company-info-config"

Configuration

The following environment variables are available to configure the package:

# Define the default country, used when a country is not given.
COMPANY_INFO_DEFAULT_COUNTRY=dk

# Define URL and credentials for the Danish CVR API service.
COMPANY_INFO_CVRAPI_BASE_URL=https://cvrapi.dk/api

# Define URL and credentials for the Danish VIRK service.
COMPANY_INFO_VIRK_BASE_URL=http://distribution.virk.dk
COMPANY_INFO_VIRK_USER_ID=xxx
COMPANY_INFO_VIRK_PASSWORD=xxx

# Define URL and credentials for the English Gazette service.
COMPANY_INFO_GAZETTE_BASE_URL=https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk
COMPANY_INFO_GAZETTE_KEY=xxx

# Define maximum number of results returned (works for VIRK and Gazette).
COMPANY_INFO_MAX_RESULTS=10

# Define the default provider for each country.
COMPANY_INFO_PROVIDER_DK=virk # Can also be cvrapi.
COMPANY_INFO_PROVIDER_GB=gazette
COMPANY_INFO_PROVIDER_NO=cvrapi

Usage

The package provides two general static methods, allowing you to perform company lookups from either name or number (in Denmark, the number is the CVR number).

The methods take a country parameter, which must be one of the supported countries, or left out or empty to use the configured default country.

The country code selects the appropriate underlying service for the lookup. Currently the package supports countries dk and no for the Danish CVR API service, dk for the Danish VIRK service and gb for the English Gazette service. If an invalid country is given, an InvalidCountryException is thrown.

Example lookups:

use Worksome\CompanyInfo\Facades\CompanyInfo;

$companies = CompanyInfo::lookupName('worksome', 'dk');
// - or -
$companies = CompanyInfo::lookupNumber('37990485', 'dk');

The lookup methods returns an array of companies matching the name or number, or null if the underlying service failed.

The array may be empty, if there are no companies matching the given name or number.

If there are matches (or just one), then each matching company can be found in the array.

Company info data structure

The company information is a simplified uniform representation of the data provided by the underlying service.

[
    'number'   => '37990485',
    'name'     => 'Worksome ApS',
    'address1' => 'Toldbodgade 35, 1.',
    'address2' => '',
    'zipcode'  => '1253',
    'city'     => 'København K',
    'country'  => 'DK',
    'phone'    => '71991931',
    'email'    => 'accounting@worksome.com',
]

The number field is the CVR number for the dk country and company number for the gb country.

Artisan

The package adds a command for performing lookups at the commandline. This is probably most useful while configuring the services, to check if your access is working.

php artisan company-info:lookup --name=worksome --country=dk
php artisan company-info:lookup --number=37990485 --country=dk

The company information will be displayed in table format, unless option --json is given, then it is output in formatted JSON.

Documentation for services

CVR API (DK)

There is a free Danish API service for CVR lookups, which does not require obtaining access from VIRK, but is rate-limited, so if you make a lot of requests, you might suddenly get a null result, which is due to a "QUOTA EXCEEDED" error from CVR API. You can pay to have a larger quota, or use the official VIRK service instead (see below).

VIRK (DK)

VIRK is the official Danish service for CVR lookups. See some documentation here.

To obtain access and credentials to the Danish VIRK service, contact Erhvervsstyrelsen via this page: https://datacvr.virk.dk/artikel/system-til-system-adgang-til-cvr-data.

Gazette (GB)

This package uses the company search part of the Gazette service.

To obtain access and credentials to the Gazette service, see https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/.

Testing

To help you write tests using CompanyInfo, we provide a fake implementation via the CompanyInfo::fake() method.

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use Worksome\CompanyInfo\Facades\CompanyInfo;

it('can perform company info lookup using faked response', function () {
    $lookup = [
        'name'    => 'worksome',
        'country' => 'dk',
    ];

    $response = [[
        'number'   => '37990485',
        'name'     => 'Worksome ApS',
        'address1' => 'Toldbodgade 35, 1.',
        'address2' => '',
        'zipcode'  => '1253',
        'city'     => 'København K',
        'country'  => 'DK',
        'phone'    => '71991931',
        'email'    => 'accounting@worksome.com',
    ]];

    CompanyInfo::fake($lookup, $response);

    $companies = CompanyInfo::lookupName('worksome', 'dk');

    expect($companies)->toHaveCount(1);

    expect($companies[0]->toArray())->toEqual($response[0]);
});

The package has a suite of functional tests as well as phpstan analysis and coding style checking.

Run all the tests like this:

composer test

See composer.json for other options for tests and linting.

The test suite uses a faked http response instead of calling the actual external services. The faked response is a copy of an actual response from the service.

If you want to run tests against the actual external service, copy phpunit.xml.dist to phpunit.xml and change the COMPANY_INFO_xxx variables in it to the credentials you have obtained.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security Vulnerabilities

Please review our security policy on how to report security vulnerabilities.

Credits

• Odinn Adalsteinsson
• Worksome
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.