Features

Besides greatly simplifying the process of querying the Apify API, the client provides other useful features.

Automatic parsing and error handling

Based on the endpoint, the client automatically extracts the relevant data and returns it in the expected format. Date strings are automatically converted to Date objects. For exceptions, we throw an ApifyApiError, which wraps the plain JSON errors returned by API and enriches them with other context for easier debugging.

Retries with exponential backoff

Network communication sometimes fails, that's a given. The client will automatically retry requests that failed due to a network error, an internal error of the Apify API (HTTP 500+) or rate limit error (HTTP 429). By default, it will retry up to 8 times. First retry will be attempted after ~500ms, second after ~1000ms and so on. You can configure those parameters using the maxRetries and minDelayBetweenRetriesMillis options of the ApifyClient constructor.

Convenience functions and options

Some actions can't be performed by the API itself, such as indefinite waiting for an actor run to finish (because of network timeouts). The client provides convenient call() and waitForFinish() functions that do that. Key-value store records can be retrieved as objects, buffers or streams via the respective options, dataset items can be fetched as individual objects or serialized data and we plan to add better stream support and async iterators.