Apify documentation
Overview of the Apify platform's documentation. Make your first steps in web scraping and automating processes or dive deep into technical reference.
If you're new to Apify, it's great to meet you! Let's get you up to speed with what we do.
Apify is an online cloud platform specializing in web scraping, data extraction and robotic process automation. With Apify, you can easily compare prices of services or generate new leads for your business by extracting structured data from websites. In addition, you can use our tools to automate manual workflows such as filling in forms or uploading files.
This site contains everything you need to know about using Apify, from beginner-friendly tutorials for using our ready-made scrapers to information about how to develop your own actors, manage your stored data or reduce blocking using proxies.
We are always trying to improve our documentation, so if you have any feedback, please let us know using the Feedback button on the right.
Get started
Almost everything we do is centered around actors. Actors are cloud programs running on the Apify platform that can scrape web pages, process data or automate workflows. You can learn more about actors by checking out their documentation.
Once you're familiar with the basics, you can visit Apify Store and try some of our ready-made tools such as the Booking Scraper (dtrungtin/booking-scraper), SEO Audit Tool (drobnikj/seo-audit-tool), or the Google Sheets Import & Export (lukaskrivka/google-sheets) tool.
Tutorials
If you're interested in learning how to scrape websites or automate processes using Apify, visit our tutorials. They will walk you through the principles of our scraping tools and prepare you for more advanced projects.
To learn how to build your own actor from scratch, you can use the Apify SDK. It is a scalable JavaScript/Node.js library tailor-made for data extraction and web automation jobs (not only) with headless Chrome and Puppeteer.
Experienced users
For everything you need to know about Apify actors such as development, running, publishing or platform limits, visit the Actors section.
If you're looking to set up recurring events such as actor or task runs, check out the Schedules page.
To execute events during your actor runs, you'll need to set up a Webhook.
To learn all about how you can store and manage your data, visit the Storage section.
If you're looking to collaborate on a project or just to share your resources with other Apify users, the Access rights page has what you need. There, you can learn about our organization account and the kind of permissions you can grant for your resources.
The API reference will guide you through setting up programmatic access to your resources, while the JavaScript API client will make it a breeze to access the API from any JavaScript/Node.js application.
To reduce blocking from the sites you're trying to scrape, use the Apify Proxy.
And, last but not least, our command-line client will help you to create, develop, run and deploy Apify actors locally.
External resources
- Stack Overflow - community questions.
- Help center - examples, tutorials and various tips & tricks.
- Video tutorials - step-by-step video tutorials for beginners.
Anything missing? Please let us know at support@apify.com or using the Feedback button on the right.