Environment variables

Learn how to provide your actor with context that determines its behavior through a plethora of pre-defined environment variables offered by the Apify SDK.

Aside from custom environment variables, the actor's process has several environment variables set to provide it with context:

Environment Variable	Description
APIFY_ACTOR_ID	ID of the actor.
APIFY_ACTOR_RUN_ID	ID of the actor run.
APIFY_ACTOR_BUILD_ID	ID of the actor build used in the run.
APIFY_ACTOR_BUILD_NUMBER	Build number of the actor build used in the run.
APIFY_ACTOR_TASK_ID	ID of the actor task. It's empty if actor is run outside of any task, e.g. directly using the API.
APIFY_ACTOR_EVENTS_WS_URL	Websocket URL where actor may listen for events from Actor platform. See documentation for more information.
APIFY_DEFAULT_DATASET_ID	ID of the dataset where you can push the data.
APIFY_DEFAULT_KEY_VALUE_STORE_ID	ID of the key-value store where the actor's input and output data are stored.
APIFY_DEFAULT_REQUEST_QUEUE_ID	ID of the request queue that stores and handles requests that you enqueue.
APIFY_INPUT_KEY	The key of the record in the default key-value store that holds the actor input. Typically it's INPUT, but it might be something else.
APIFY_HEADLESS	If set to 1, the web browsers inside the actor should run in headless mode because there is no windowing system available.
APIFY_IS_AT_HOME	Is set to 1 if the actor is running on Apify servers.
APIFY_MEMORY_MBYTES	Indicates the size of memory allocated for the actor run, in megabytes. It can be used by actors to optimize their memory usage.
APIFY_PROXY_PASSWORD	The Apify Proxy password of the user who started the actor.
APIFY_STARTED_AT	Date when the actor was started.
APIFY_TIMEOUT_AT	Date when the actor will time out.
APIFY_TOKEN	The API token of the user who started the actor.
APIFY_USER_ID	ID of the user who started the actor. Note that it might be different than the owner of the actor.
APIFY_CONTAINER_PORT	TCP port on which the actor can start a HTTP server to receive messages from the outside world. See Container web server section for more details.
APIFY_CONTAINER_URL	A unique public URL under which the actor run web server is accessible from the outside world. See Container web server section for more details.

Dates are always in the UTC timezone and are represented in simplified extended ISO format (ISO 8601), e.g. 2022-07-13T14:23:37.281Z.

To access environment variables in Node.js, use the process.env object, for example:

console.log(process.env.APIFY_USER_ID);

To access environment variables in Python, use the os.environ dictionary, for example:

import os
print(os.environ['APIFY_USER_ID'])