Apify Core Workflow A — Build & Deploy a Scraper

Overview

End-to-end workflow: define input schema, build a Crawlee-based Actor, extract structured data, store results in datasets, test locally, and deploy to Apify platform. This is the primary money-path workflow for Apify.

Prerequisites

• npm install apify crawlee in your project
• npm install -g apify-cli and apify login completed
• For programmatic retrieval (Step 6), an API token in APIFY_TOKEN — read it from the environment (process.env.APIFY_TOKEN), never hard-code it
• Familiarity with apify-sdk-patterns

Instructions

Step 1: Define Input Schema

Create .actor/INPUT_SCHEMA.json: