GoKawiilTwelve years ago, I wrote 174 lines of PHP as a stopgap for AOL’s content management system. I put it on Packagist in case anyone else needed the same patch, and somehow it’s been installed nearly 20 million times since. Today I marked it deprecated.
A temporary shim
In 2014, we were in the middle of upgrading AOL’s CMS from PHP 5.2 to 5.3. Part of that upgrade was dropping version 1 of the pecl_http extension, which gave us a function called http_build_url() . A CMS deals with a lot of URLs, and ours called that function in dozens of places. I wasn’t touching those. The function seemed straightforward enough to reproduce, so I wrote my own http_build_url() , defined only if the real one didn’t already exist. The old code never knew anything had changed.
Composer was just taking off at the time, which made sharing it easy. I figured it would earn its keep for a year or two, until the PHP community moved on to something better.
That’s a lot of installs
Well, it wasn’t temporary. It’s been installed from Packagist nearly 20 million times, and it still picks up over 400,000 installs a month.
And it turns out Composer is only part of the picture. WPML, the market-leading multilingual plugin for WordPress, bundles the polyfill directly in its codebase, and WPML says it’s installed on over 1.5 million sites. The domain-name library idna-convert depends on it too, which is how it ships inside the source of SPIP, a French content management system, and how it ended up packaged in Debian and Ubuntu. Between all of them, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve visited a website that is still running my code.
I never imagined it would go this far.
Coming back to it
I didn’t grasp how far it had spread until a few months ago, when I looked at the package for the first time in years. I knew it had users. By 2021 I’d been out of PHP for a while, and the downloads were surprising enough that I asked for a new maintainer. Three people offered. Shortly after I asked, we lost a family member unexpectedly, and it turned our world upside down for a while. I never followed up, and that’s on me. By the time things settled, other goals had taken over, and I forgot about the package for years.
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