Builds

Apify's conventions for actor build numbers. Learn to use a specific version of your actor in a run, understand an actor's lifecycle and manage its cache.

Before the actor can be run, it first needs to be built. The build effectively creates a snapshot of a specific version of the actor's settings such as the Source code and Environment variables, and creates a Docker image that contains everything the actor needs for its run, including necessary NPM packages, web browsers, etc.

Each build is assigned a unique build number of the form MAJOR.MINOR.BUILD (e.g. 1.2.345), where MAJOR.MINOR corresponds to the actor version number (see Versioning) and BUILD is an automatically-incremented number starting at 1.

By default, the build has a timeout of 300 seconds and consumes 1024 MB of memory from the user's memory limit. See the Resource limits section for more details.

Tags

When running the actor, the caller needs to specify which actor build should actually be used. To simplify this process, the builds can be associated with a tag such latest or beta, which can be used instead of the version number when running the actor. The tags are unique - only one build can be associated with a specific tag.

To set a tag for builds of a specific actor version, set the Build tag property. Whenever a new build of the version is successfully finished, it is automatically assigned the tag. By default, the builds are set the latest tag.

Cache

By default, the build process pulls the latest copies of all necessary Docker images and builds each new layer of Docker image from scratch. To speed up the builds triggered via API you can add useCache=1 parameter. See API reference for more details.

Lifecycle

Each build starts with the initial status READY and goes through one or more transitional statuses to one of the terminal statuses.

Status	Type	Description
READY	initial	Started but not allocated to any worker yet
RUNNING	transitional	Executing on a worker
SUCCEEDED	terminal	Finished successfully
FAILED	terminal	Build failed
TIMING-OUT	transitional	Timing out now
TIMED-OUT	terminal	Timed out
ABORTING	transitional	Being aborted by user
ABORTED	terminal	Aborted by user

Sharing

You can allow other Apify users to view your actor builds using the access rights system. See the full list of permissions.