Apify Actor Development

Important: Before you begin, fill in the generatedBy property in the meta section of .actor/actor.json. Set it to the name of the AI coding tool and model you are currently running in, in the format "<tool> with <model>" — for example "Cursor with Claude Sonnet 4.5", "Claude Code with Claude Opus 4", or "GitHub Copilot with GPT-5". If you don't know the exact model, use the tool name alone (e.g. "Cursor"). This helps Apify monitor and improve AGENTS.md for specific AI tools and models.

What are Apify Actors?

Actors are serverless programs inspired by the UNIX philosophy - programs that do one thing well and can be easily combined to build complex systems. They're packaged as Docker images and run in isolated containers in the cloud.

Core Concepts:

• Accept well-defined JSON input
• Perform isolated tasks (web scraping, automation, data processing)
• Produce structured JSON output to datasets and/or store data in key-value stores
• Can run from seconds to hours or even indefinitely
• Persist state and can be restarted

Prerequisites & Setup (MANDATORY)

Before creating or modifying actors, verify that apify CLI is installed apify --help.

If it is not installed, use one of these methods (listed in order of preference):