Environment Variables

The following is a list of the environment variables used by Apify SDK that are available to the user. The SDK is capable of running without any env vars present, but certain features will only become available after env vars are properly set. You can use Apify CLI to set the env vars for you. Apify platform also sets the variables automatically.

Important env vars

The following environment variables have large impact on the way Apify SDK works and its behavior can be changed significantly by setting or unsetting them.

APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR

Defines the path to a local directory where KeyValueStore, Dataset, and RequestQueue store their data. Typically, it is set to ./storage. If omitted, you should define the APIFY_TOKEN environment variable instead.

APIFY_TOKEN

The API token for your Apify account. It is used to access the Apify API, e.g. to access cloud storage or to run an Actor on the Apify platform. You can find your API token on the Account - Integrations page. If omitted, you should define the APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR environment variable instead.

Combinations of APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR and APIFY_TOKEN

By combining the env vars in various ways, you can greatly influence the behavior of Apify SDK.

Env Vars	API	Storages
none OR APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR	no	local
APIFY_TOKEN	yes	Apify platform
APIFY_TOKEN AND APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR	yes	local+platform

When using both APIFY_TOKEN and APIFY_LOCAL_STORAGE_DIR, you can use all the Apify platform features and your data will be stored locally by default. If you want to access platform storages, you can use the { forceCloud: true } option in their respective functions.

const localDataset = await Actor.openDataset('my-local-data');
const remoteDataset = await Actor.openDataset('my-remote-data', { forceCloud: true });

Convenience env vars

The next group includes env vars that can help achieve certain goals without having to change your code, such as temporarily switching log level to DEBUG.

APIFY_HEADLESS

If set to 1, web browsers launched by Apify SDK will run in the headless mode. You can still override this setting in the code, e.g. by passing the headless: true option to the Actor.launchPuppeteer() function. But having this setting in an environment variable allows you to develop the crawler locally in headful mode to simplify the debugging, and only run the crawler in headless mode once you deploy it to the Apify platform. By default, the browsers are launched in headful mode, i.e. with windows.

APIFY_LOG_LEVEL

Specifies the minimum log level, which can be one of the following values (in order of severity): DEBUG, INFO, WARNING and ERROR. By default, the log level is set to INFO, which means that DEBUG messages are not printed to console. See the utils.log namespace for logging utilities.

APIFY_MEMORY_MBYTES

Sets the amount of system memory in megabytes to be used by the AutoscaledPool. It is used to limit the number of concurrently running tasks. By default, the max amount of memory to be used is set to one quarter of total system memory, i.e. on a system with 8192 MB of memory, the autoscaling feature will only use up to 2048 MB of memory.

APIFY_PROXY_PASSWORD

Optional password to Apify Proxy for IP address rotation. If you have an Apify Account, you can find the password on the Proxy page in the Apify Console. The password is automatically inferred using the APIFY_TOKEN env var, so in most cases, you don't need to touch it. You should use it when, for some reason, you need access to Apify Proxy, but no access to Apify API, or when you need access to proxy from a different account than your token represents.