This repository stores boilerplate templates and code examples for Apify Actor. The purpose of these templates is to help devlopers get started with actor development on the Apify platform.
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:
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.
You can find more code examples in the Apify SDK documentation.
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:
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.
To run the template:
cd my-actor
apify run
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();
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.
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.
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.
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.