Apify orchestrator Actor development

An orchestrator Actor is a parent Apify Actor whose job is to coordinate a sequence (or parallel fan-out) of other Actors. It takes user input, calls sub-Actor A, feeds A's output into sub-Actor B, optionally runs an LLM transformation between them, and emits the combined result to its own dataset.

This skill covers TypeScript-only orchestrators built on the apify-orchestrator library. It does not cover Python, JavaScript, or Standby-mode Actors.

Important: Before writing code, fill in the generatedBy property in .actor/actor.json (e.g., "Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.7"). This helps Apify improve tooling for specific AI models.

Prerequisites and setup

Verify the apify CLI is installed:

apify --help

If not installed, use a package manager (never curl | bash):