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Programming interface

Learn about the programming interface of Apify Actors, important commands and features provided by the Apify SDK, and how to use them in your Actors.

This chapter will guide you through all the commands you need to build your first Actor. This interface is provided by Apify SDKs. The chapter starts with basic commands and guides you through system events and environment variables that are available to your Actor both locally and when running on Apify platform.

Basic commands

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.

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.

Status messages

Use custom status messages to inform the user about the progress of your Actor run.

Status events

Learn about system events sent to your Actor and how to benefit from them.

Container web server

Learn how to run a web server inside your Actor, which enables you to communicate with the outer world via UI and API.

Metamorph

The metamorph operation transforms an Actor run into the run of another Actor with a new input.

Actor Standby

Learn how to use Actors in lightweight mode as a blazingly fast API server.