auregistre

What changed in a French company, and when.

A company-data service usually publishes a state: the name, the address and the share capital as of today. This API publishes the history: every value the French official gazette (BODACC) has recorded for a company, the date it was published, and a link to the announcement that published it.

Three things follow from that one idea: the timeline of a company and the insolvency judgments against it, a watch over companies you already track, and the count of insolvency openings over time.

Nothing is inferred, scored or estimated.

No API key, no account, no quota to apply for. Every figure here was published by a public source; whoever republishes it should say so, and every answer carries the sentence to do it with.

• The API: https://auregistre.fr
• Human documentation: https://auregistre.fr/api
• The contract: openapi.json, also served live at https://auregistre.fr/api/openapi.json
• The site: https://auregistre.fr

Install

npm install auregistre

import { timeline, changes, insolvencies, ApiError } from 'auregistre';

const doctolib = await timeline('794 598 813');

Zero dependencies, ESM, Node 18 or newer. The client is a thin layer: it builds the addresses, reads refusals as problem documents, and follows pages. Nothing stops you from calling the API with curl.

Endpoints

Address	Answers
GET /api/company/{siren}/timeline	Every recorded change for one company, and its insolvency judgments
GET /api/changes?siren={a,b,c}&since={date}	What the gazette published on companies you already track
GET /api/insolvencies	Insolvency openings in France, twelve months against the twelve before
GET /api/insolvencies/department/{code}	The same barometer, for one department
GET /api/insolvencies/trade/{slug}	The same barometer, for one trade
GET /api/openapi.json	The contract, generated from the constants the code serves
GET /api	The human documentation, with one anchor per refusal code

There is deliberately no search endpoint, and there will not be one: article A.123-69 of the French commercial code forbids four search criteria, all judicial, and the only shape that cannot expose them is the one that exposes no criterion at all. /api/changes is not an exception - it takes identifiers you already hold, never criteria, and a caller who does not know a SIREN learns none from it. To resolve a NAME into a SIREN, the state's own API does it better: recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr.

The two barometer scopes are the closed lists the website already publishes as pages, never a filter composed from what you send: an unknown department or trade is a 404, and the refusal carries the list you can choose from.

The conventions, which are the same across the fleet

This API answers by the same convention as its two siblings (auregistre, titelia, quivad). What holds for one holds for the three.

• No version in the address, and none in the body. The promise that replaces it is written in x-stability of the contract: a field may be added, none is removed or renamed under a caller, and an address does not move.
• Refusals are RFC 9457 problem documents, served as application/problem+json. type is a documentation anchor that opens in a browser; title, status and detail say the rest. An error is never an HTML page - a program that calls .json() on one gets a parse error and goes looking for the fault in the wrong place.
• Long collections are cut by limit and offset, never silently. The page block carries total, more, and the absolute address of the next and previous pages; the same two links travel in the Link header. An unreadable parameter falls back to the default rather than refusing, and an offset past the end is an empty list, not an error.
• Every address in an answer is absolute. A response stored on somebody's disk has to say which host it came from.
• source and served_by answer two different questions: who PRODUCED the figures, and who ANSWERED. Confusing them is how a republished figure gets credited to the wrong party.
• Every answer carries a weak ETag and honours If-None-Match: hand it back and get a 304 with no body.
• Discovery links on every answer (RFC 8631): service-desc points at the contract, service-doc at the human documentation. One answer in hand is enough to find the whole specification.
• Rate limited by address, on /api only, and a cached answer does not count. A 429 carries retry-after and says how long to wait in the body.

What the data does not say

Three limits are worth more than the rest of this page, because each one lets a reader draw a wrong conclusion in silence.

• The earliest value is not the original value. The gazette has been digitised since 2008. For an older company, first_known is the oldest value on record, not the value it was founded with.
• The register publishes THAT something changed, not by how much. A capital increase appears as a new figure on a date; who came in, and on what terms, is not published.
• Announcements that merely cite a SIREN are excluded. On large franchised networks these are around 40% of what a naive search on the identifier returns, and they describe a different company.

Three more belong to the addresses that came after the timeline.

• insolvency is served ready-made, and must not be recomputed. Taking the most severe entry of proceedings would mark as liquidated a company a court put back on its feet: a closure cancels a liquidation, a set-aside cancels the judgment it sets aside, and two judgments can share a date.
• The watch filters on the PUBLICATION date, not on the date of the act. The two differ by sixteen days at the median, and filtering on the act would miss precisely what a watch exists to catch. complete: false means the list is a BEGINNING; an empty list with complete: true means nothing happened, which is a different fact.
• The three natures of insolvency do not add up to the total. A judgment naming two procedures answers two filters, which overshoots by well under one percent. Closures are not counted at all, and the current month is always excluded because a month still running reads as a collapse.

Examples

Runnable, in examples/: curl.sh, node.mjs, python.py.

Licence

The client code in this repository is MIT (see LICENSE).

The data is not covered by that licence: Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab), BODACC. Cite the source when you republish it - every answer carries the sentence to do it with.

Reporting something wrong

A wrong line is worth an issue: https://github.com/auregistre/api/issues. Name the address you called and what you expected; the answer carries served_by, which is what says the figure came from here rather than from the register itself.