Publishing your actor

Learn how to make your actor available to the public or keep it private. Prepare your actor for Apify Store with a description and README file.

Once you have finished coding and testing your actor, it's time to publish it. Go to the Publication tab on the actor's detail page and select the Published switch.

As well as a README, input schema, and a category, you'll need a username. You can set one on your Profile page. Choose your username wisely, as changing it at a later stage will break any integrations that use it.

Private or public?

Actors can be private or public.

Public actors are shown in the store and can be run by anyone. Each public actor has a globally unique identifier that consists of the owner's username and the actor name, e.g. apify/hello-world.

Private actors can only be accessed and started by their owner. To keep your actor private, keep the Published switch in the Publication tab on Off.

Title

The title should be simple and clear. Use the official name of the website your actor is for and add its function, e.g. Scraper / Tool / Example to make its function clear to users. Do not use abbreviations, as they might confuse users.

See our tips for naming actors.

Description

In one or two sentences (ideally), describe you actor's main feature. Use simple, specific, non-technical language that all users will understand.

To add more details, including technical documentation, you can include a README. If the actor's source code is hosted in a Git repository, Zip file or GitHub Gist, add a README.md file to the repository's root. To see an example, visit apify/web-scraper.

Categories

Pick the category from the user's perspective. Try to only pick one and only add more if necessary.

SEO title and SEO description

If you leave these blank, the actor's regular title and description will be used. Read more on SEO and promoting your actor.

Running costs when making an actor public

IMPORTANT: Note that if you make an actor publicly available and it's used by other people, their usage is not charged towards your account. The user running the actor is always the one who pays for the computational resources consumed by an actor's execution.