Package Peak for Installing ThemeForest Themes and CodeCanyon Plugins with Composer

Here at Sterner Stuff, we’re big fans of Bedrock. It allows us to manage our WordPress dependencies via Composer, and keep our Git repositories clean.

One of the biggest Bedrock caveats is how to get your premium plugins into your WordPress site. You can always commit them into version control, but that’s awfully messy. Some developers create Composer endpoints (thanks Delicious Brains team!), and for plugins that you can script downloading of, we built a GitHub Actions-based solution for maintaining a private mirror, essentially automating the process outlined in Roots’s own guide.

But this leaves one very large source of premium plugins unaddressed: Envato.

What’s Envato? Envato is the company behind the ThemeForest and CodeCanyon marketplace. These are really common places for some WordPress website developers and designers to purchase plugins and themes.

Introducing: Package Peak

We’ve built Package Peak as a solution to this. Package Peak is a service that will sync with one (or many!) Envato accounts and crawl all purchases made for WordPress plugins and themes. It saves a copy of the plugin or theme and makes it available via an endpoint that Composer can understand. So you end up doing something like this if you need, for example, Slider Revolution:

composer require themepunch/slider-revolutionCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Of course, there’s a little more work than that to get authenticated, but that’s what everything boils down to. Package Peak handles versioning and reporting the latest versions.

Keeping Backups

Even if you aren’t using Composer, ThemeForest and CodeCanyon don’t keep old versions of your purchases available for download. If a new version breaks something, you have to contact the plugin or theme author, who can hopefully provide a download.

No more with Package Peak. As long as Package Peak is syncing with your Envato account, it’ll keep old versions of plugins and themes saved as well. That means you can do something like:

composer require themepunch/slider-revolution:6.4.XCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

And you’ll get the correct version. Or, you can simply download the old version from the Package Peak dashboard as a zip.

The only caveat here is that Package Peak can’t go back and get old versions. Only versions that have released since you started using Package Peak with the Envato account that purchased that plugin or theme will be available.

We’re really excited about what Package Peak has done for us internally, and hope you can take advantage, too! Sign up for your free trial now.