Get all installed Joomla extensions and their version

Question

I'm not really familiar with Joomla, but I need to write a script that is supposed to list all the installed extensions and their version number, if possible. I've already done this for WordPress, TYPO3 and Drupal, but in Joomla this seems to be a pretty big pain in the ass from what I've seen so far because:

• there are three types of extensions, located in three different folders
• many extensions are present in all three folders upon installation (though the version number is usually found in only one of them)
• the version number is not documented regularly, and if it is, it's not always in a consistent way. For example I downloaded the plugin "jNews". On the website, it say "8.5.1" but in the modules folder there is a .xml file "mod_jnews.xml" with the following content:

->

<extension type="module" version="1.5.0" ...>
...
<version>2.0</version>
...
</extension>

So what is it? 8.5.1? 1.5.0? 2.0? -

Having no experience with Joomla whatsoever, I find this pretty confusing, though it may also be a misunderstanding on my part.

What I actually want to know, though is: Is there are reliable way to get all installed Joomla extensions + their version just based on the folder structure and the files within? Or any other way to get this information through a script (Python in my case)?

Answer 1

Any extension that is installed, is stored in the database, in the #__extensions table. So you can run a simply database query to get the name and the manifest cache (which contains the version):

$db = JFactory::getDbo();

$query = $db->getQuery(true);

$query->select($db->quoteName(array('name', 'manifest_cache')))
      ->from($db->quoteName('#__extensions'));

$db->setQuery($query);

$results = $db->loadObjectList();

foreach ($results as $extension)
{
    $decode = json_decode($extension->manifest_cache);
    echo $extension->name . ' : ' . $decode->version . '<br>';
}

Note that the above will get all plugins, components, modules, templates, libraries and packages, including default Joomla extensions.

You can of course change which types of extensions you'd like to get. For example, if you only want to get components, change the query in the above code to this:

$query->select($db->quoteName(array('name', 'manifest_cache', 'type')))
      ->from($db->quoteName('#__extensions'))
      ->where($db->quoteName('type') . ' = ' . $db->quote('component'));

Hope this helps