Programmatic access to the content of the archive is available via the Software Heritage API.

The API allows to navigate the archive as a graph of development-related objects, such as file contents, directories, commits, releases. With the API developers can lookup individual objects by their IDs, retrieve their metadata, and jump from one to another following links — e.g., from commits to the corresponding directories or parent commits, from releases to released commits, etc. The API also allows to retrieve crawling information, such as tracked software origins and the full list of visits performed on each of them. This allows, for instance, to know when snapshots of a specific Git repository where taken and, for each of them, where each branch was pointing at the time.