How to track new products and handle name inconsistencies in endoflife.date API?

[Siraj19176]

I've been using the endoflife.date API to check which libraries or tools have reached their end-of-life (EOL), and it’s been quite helpful so far.

However, I’m facing two issues:

1. No way to know when new products are added. I haven’t found a method or endpoint that notifies me when a new product is introduced to the API. This makes it hard to stay updated as new entries are added.
2. Inconsistent naming across products. Some product names don’t match what I expect. For example, I look for Node.js, but the API uses nodejs as the endpoint. These kinds of inconsistencies make automation a bit tricky.

I'm looking for suggestions on:

How others are staying up to date with new products added to the API.

Best practices for handling naming mismatches — is there a standard mapping or should I build my own?

Any help or advice would be appreciated!

[captn3m0]

We have a solution for the first one: #6158. You can subscribe to this issue to get notified of new products. We try to do an announcement once every month or so. We will put an announcement on the website with an RSS feed soon.

Inconsistent naming is an unsolvable problem in the absolute, but we try to solve it as much as we can:

1. We have redirects, so https://endoflife.date/go takes to you https://endoflife.date/golang (and it applies to the API as well).
2. We support PURLs and CPEs, feat(api/v1): add known Identifiers #7361 is adding endpoints to list all identifiers which will map to our product name. So if you have a PURL or CPE or repology identifier you can use an endpoint like https://deploy-preview-7361--endoflife-date.netlify.app/api/v1/identifiers/purl/ to check.
3. Product names can change. This can happen due to internal reasons (we might have used the wrong name, or there may be a better one), or due to external factors (company gets acquired). We will put in redirects in such cases, but this will also be announced as a breaking change.

Our Breaking Change policy/process is still being defined. Current version is at https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/wiki/Breaking-Changes. Feedback is welcome at #7341

[Siraj19176]

Hi!

Thanks a lot for this detailed response.

I wanted to know a bit more about

"We have redirects, so https://endoflife.date/go takes to you https://endoflife.date/golang (and it applies to the API as well)."

How do you handle these redirects, do you maintain some mapping, or do you use some algorithm to decide these redirects.

[captn3m0]

These are defined in each product as alternate_urls. A little more explanation at https://endoflife.date/contribute

We compile all of these into a _redirects file which is picked up by Netlify.