Software Heritage Archive

Overview

Software Heritage is a nonprofit initiative that operates the world's largest public archive of software source code. Its mission is to collect, preserve, and make accessible all publicly available software source code, along with its development history, for the benefit of present and future generations. The archive is accessible at archive.softwareheritage.org.

History and Founding

Software Heritage was initiated by the French national research institute Inria and publicly unveiled on June 30, 2016. A partnership agreement between Inria and UNESCO was signed on April 3, 2017, establishing a collaborative framework for preserving software source code as cultural and scientific heritage. In February 2019, the Paris Call on Software Source Code was published following a meeting of 40 international experts convened by Inria and UNESCO. The initiative is structured as an open, non-profit multi-stakeholder organization supported by institutional and industry partners including Microsoft, Intel, Société Générale, and academic institutions. In April 2025, the SWHID (SoftWare Hash Identifier) became ISO/IEC international standard 18670.

Collections and Holdings

As of recent reports, the Software Heritage archive contains over 17 billion unique source files from more than 170 million software projects. Source code is collected by continuously crawling major code hosting platforms including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and package archives such as npm and PyPI. The archive uses a Merkle DAG data structure to store and deduplicate code, with each artifact assigned a unique SWHID for permanent citation.

Access

The archive is freely accessible to all users. It supports a "Save Code Now" feature allowing anyone to trigger the immediate archival of a software repository. The French Digital Directorate uses the archive to preserve all public sector software source codes in France.