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.

To publish your actor, go to the Publication tab on the actor detail page and tick the Published box.

As well as the requirements shown under Is everything set?, 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 API URLs that contain 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 box in the Publication tab unticked.

Description

The short actor description shown in the store is taken from Settings → Description. Additionally, if the actor's source code is hosted in a Git repository, Zip file or GitHub Gist, you can add a long description in the Markdown language to the README.md file in the root of the source code's directory. To see an example of how this looks, visit apify/web-scraper.

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.