@apify/actor-templates

Apify Actor templates

This repository stores boilerplate templates and code examples for Apify Actor. The template helps you to get started with your Apify project quickly.

• Hello world -The smallest actor you will see today, it only takes input and generates output.
• Puppeteer crawler - Recursively crawl a website using Chrome and Puppeteer.
• Puppeteer single page - Load a single web page using Chrome and Puppeteer and extract data from it.
• Cheerio crawler - Recursively crawl a website using raw HTTP requests and Cheerio HTML parser.
• Basic crawler - Crawl a list of URLs using raw HTTP requests and Cheerio HTML parser.
• Apify project - Standardized template containing boilerplate and code style rules used for Apify Marketplace projects.

Usage

You can start using them right away in Apify command-line client:

npm -g install apify-cli
apify create my-hello-world --template basic_crawler

It creates a boilerplate template in your current director with a basic_crawler template. You can check Apify command-line client documentation for more details.

Fetching information about the templates

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 ./dist/templates directory. The archive is used to to create a boilerplate template in apify CLI or other places in Apify system.

Update and add templates

If you want to change template, you need to update the files and manifest.json and then push to master. 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 choose one of the templates when using the apify create command. The propagation happens after committing a new version of templates into 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.