Peppol Directory

This article is meant to describe the intended use cases for the Peppol Directory. It describes its strengths and its weaknesses and provides some usage guidance.

The Peppol Directory is a centralized database containing all the collected Business Cards. The directory is operated by the OpenPeppol Operating Office (OO) and publicly available as a test instance and a production instance.
It is not mandatory for Peppol Participants to be listed in the Peppol Directory, but I would say it is recommended. This implies, that not every Peppol Participant that exists, can also be found in the Peppol Directory. Currently approximately 90-95% of all participants are listed in the Peppol Directory. The only authoritative source of truth for the existence of a Peppol Participant ID is the DNS based check that can e.g. be done on this page.

The Directory is filled by the decentralized Peppol SMPs (Service Metadata Publishers). An SMP may provide a Business Card for a Peppol Participant it manages - other SMPs cannot do that. The Business Card contains non-technical data of a participant and should contain a similar data depth as information of a website imprint. Every time the Business Card is changed or the document types of a participant change, it's the SMP's responsibility for informing the Directory about that, by requesting an update of the Business Card of said participant. The Peppol Directory is not actively updating Business Cards from your SMP. Each change MUST be pushed from the SMP to the Peppol Directory.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. • Q: Can I use the Peppol Directory to check if a participant is registered in the Peppol Network?
   • A: No, because publication to the Peppol Directory is only recommended but not enforced. Instead perform a DNS based query as e.g. provided on this site or use a standalone tool you can run on your premises, like https://github.com/Helger-IT/smp-query-webapp
2. • Q: The Peppol Directory does not show the details of my participant. What can I do?
   • A: There is a multitude of potential reasons for this. Here is a list of the most common ones:
     • Have you provided a Business Card for the participant in your SMP? Only the SMP owning the participant is allowed to publish the respective Business Card for it.
     • Did you configure the correct Peppol Directory instance depending on the SMP stage you are operating? For the production Peppol Network use https://directory.peppol.eu, for the test Peppol Network use https://test-directory.peppol.eu
     • Make sure, that your SMP is capable of communicating with the Peppol Directory instance. This refers to the API that the SMP needs to call at the Directory. The usage of mTLS client certificates may lead to hick-ups with outbound proxy servers, firewalls etc.
     • Make sure, that the /businesscard API of your SMP is publicly accessible over the Internet. Use e.g. the participant information tool on this site to check the "external" view
     • Be aware, that the Peppol Directory processes information in a FIFO manner. If the internal queue is very long it can take many hours between the indexation request and the appearance in the search index.