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 datetime.datetime 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.
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 max_retries and min_delay_between_retries_millis options
of the ApifyClient constructor.
Support for asynchronous usage
Starting with version 0.7.0, the package offers an asynchronous version of the client,
ApifyClientAsync,
which allows you to work with the Apify API in an asynchronous way, using the standard async/await syntax.
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 wait_for_finish() methods 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, or iterated asynchronously.