Most registries assume a central server that every team writes to and nobody trusts is current. But real API catalogs are relative to domains, teams, categories, and purposes — they are ephemeral and ever-changing, not one static list somebody blesses once. So we built API Discovery: a browser-first registry that composes purpose-scoped catalogs from a shared pool of discovered artifacts, with nothing leaving the page.
Try it → discovery.apicommons.org
Discover Into One Pool, Compose Many Catalogs
You discover into a single pool — search or Scan APIs.io, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, SwaggerHub, and Postman as you add keys, across 11 artifact types including OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Arazzo, MCP, and agent skills. Upload HAR traffic captures and they are synthesized into evidence-based OpenAPI, or Import a bundle from the enterprise helper CLI (Backstage, Apigee, Azure APIM, MuleSoft, AWS, Kong, Tyk, Kubernetes, Kafka). Then you compose named views over that pool: type an intent like “everything payments” and 🧠 Compose semantic-matches the pool with a small embedding model that runs in your browser. The same artifact can live in many catalogs, and deleting a catalog deletes nothing.
A Catalog Is a Build Artifact, Not a Database
Every composed catalog carries its recipe as x-recipe in the export and can be rebuilt against live sources anytime — freshness badges are first-class, because a catalog is something you regenerate, not something you hand-tend forever. Inside any catalog, cluster members into named business capabilities with 🧠 Suggest, pick canonicals, and ship the capability map as x-capabilities.
| Step | What you get |
|---|---|
| Discover | One shared pool across 11 artifact types |
| Compose | Purpose-scoped catalogs by intent |
| Regenerate | Rebuild from the x-recipe anytime |
| Publish | APIs.json (YAML) you commit, PR, or federate |
Publish and Federate, Don’t Centralize
Download any catalog as APIs.json in YAML, commit or PR it straight to a repo, and export a catalog of catalogs — an APIs.json includes index linking every purpose-built catalog. You federate instead of centralizing. Discovery stops at cataloging on purpose: governance and deep linting live in API Validator, and reusability scoring lives in API Reusability.
API Discovery is one of the API Commons tools, open and browser-first like the rest. This is the second in a series introducing the tools one at a time.