companies_house_client

CompaniesHouseClient

A wrapper around the Companies House Rest API.

There is another gem which does this, open-companies-house but it doesn't include authentication.

Installation

Install with Bundler like this:

gem 'companies_house_client'

Or manually:

gem install companies_house_client

Setup

Set up CompaniesHouseClient in a block:

CompaniesHouseClient.configure do |config|
    config.api_token #your token from https://developer.companieshouse.gov.uk/developer/applications
    config.ssl_settings #this gem uses Faraday; you need to point it at the appropriate CA bundle for your platform
end

SSL Setup

SSL is a bit of a faff, because you need a CA bundle for Faraday.

The configuration setting ssl_settings is a hash. You need to pass ca_path into it, with the appropriate location for your bundle.

Use

Getting a company by Company Number

Note that the leading zero in a company number is important so you have to pass find() a string.

c = CompaniesHouseClient::Company.find("company number")
c #returns a company.

Searching for a company by name

You can search for a company like this:

companies = CompaniesHouseClient::Company.search("your search", per_page: 10, page: 2)
companies #returns a collection of Companies which match your search.

per_page and page are optional.

Company Officers

Companies have many officers. You can retrieve them like this:

c = CompaniesHouseClient::Company.find("company number")
c.officers #returns a collection of Officer objects.

If you just want a list of officers for a given company, you can save a request to the /company endpoint like this:

CompaniesHouseClient::Officer.all(company_id: "company number") #will return a collection directly from the officers endpoint

Filing History

You can get a list of the company's filing history entries like this:

c = CompaniesHouseClient::Company.find("company number")
c.filing_histories #returns a collection of FilingHistory objects - note plural on the relation name

To do

• There are Appointments and Charges endpoints set up, and they're documented in the API docs, but they return a 404 for all companies. No idea why.
• Some tests would be nice.
• There an issue with the Her where it expects the child resource to have a reference to a parent, which this API doesn't. So you get (<unknown path, missing company_id>) in the responses for child objects. There is probably a solution.

Licence

This gem is MIT licenced. Have fun!