Apify Actor templates

This repository stores boilerplate templates and code examples for Apify Actor. The purpose of these templates is to help developers get started with actor development on the Apify platform.

How to use the templates

You can start using the actor templates right away with the Apify CLI:

npx apify-cli create my-crawler

or

npm -g install apify-cli
apify create my-actor

After running the command you will be prompted to select one of the templates from the list displayed in your terminal. The available templates are:

Getting started templates

Basic templates to start developing actors on the Apify platform using Node.js (JavaScript/Typescript), or Python. Just install the CLI and watch your actor run.

• Node.js + JavaScript
• Node.js + TypeScript
• Python

You can find more code examples in the Apify SDK documentation.

Project boilerplate

If you're already familiar with Actors, you can use the following templates to bootstrap new projects using an empty project templates or Crawlee templates:

Empty projects

Start a new web scraping project quickly and easily in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js) or Python with our empty project template. It provides a basic structure for the Actor with Apify JavaScript SDK or Apify Python SDK and allows you to easily add your own functionality.

• Empty JavaScript project
• Empty TypeScript project
• Empty Python project

Crawlee projects

• CheerioCrawler (TypeScript version) - Standard and up to date template for developing with Crawlee's CheerioCrawler.
• PlaywrightCrawler (TypeScript version) - Standard and up to date template for developing with Crawlee's PlaywrightCrawler.
• PuppeteerCrawler (TypeScript version) - Standard and up to date template for developing with Crawlee's PuppeteerCrawler.

To run the template:

cd my-actor
apify run

Templates API

The template manifest can be fetched programmatically. Apify CLI uses this to always fetch the most up to date templates.

npm i @apify/actor-templates

const templates = require("@apify/actor-templates");

const manifest = await templates.fetchManifest();

Publish updated/new template

All templates are stores in ./templates directory. For each template needs to create an archive of whole source code into the ./dist/templates directory. The archive is used to create a boilerplate template in apify CLI or other places in the Apify system.

Update and add templates

If you want to change a template, you will have to update the template files and the manifest.json file before pushing the changes to the master branch. After pushing to master, the archive will be automatically built using Github actions.

How to propagate templates into Apify CLI

Templates are propagated to Apify CLI templates. You can then find your newly added template when using the apify create command. The propagation happens after committing a new version of the template into the master branch. After tests succeeded the Github action builds archives of each template and pushes these archives into the repository. The CLI command then uses those archives to bootstrap your project folder. We did it this way because we can update template structure/code without publishing any package to npm. It makes templates changes agile.

Reference

• Apify Actor documentation
• Apify CLI
• Apify SDK

Contributing

If you have any ideas for improvements, either submit an issue or create a pull request. For contribution guidelines and the code of conduct, see CONTRIBUTING.md.