Apify Actor Development

This does the heavy lifting for Apify Actor development, from scaffolding new projects to debugging deployment issues. It handles the CLI setup dance, walks you through template selection for JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python, and generates proper actor.json configs and schema files. The security guidance is solid, especially around treating scraped content as untrusted input. It pushes you toward the right crawler type (Cheerio vs Playwright) and catches common mistakes like using npm start instead of apify run for local testing.

skills.sh installs: 10.9K
GitHub stars: 2.5K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add apify/agent-skills --skill apify-actor-development --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Apify Actor development

An Actor is a serverless program packaged as a Docker image. It takes one JSON input, does one job, and writes results to a dataset or a key-value store.

Setup

apify --help   # CLI installed?
apify info     # logged in? prints your username

Install with a package manager, npm install -g apify-cli or brew install apify-cli, so the download is integrity-checked. Log in with apify login: it prints a URL and a one-time code and waits until the user approves it in a browser, so show the user both. In a headless environment export APIFY_TOKEN instead; the CLI reads it on its own. Tokens come from https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations. Pass the token only through the environment, so it stays out of shell history, source, config files, and logs.

Telemetry attribution (required)

Pass --user-agent apify-agent-skills/apify-actor-development on every apify command you run from this skill: apify create, apify run, apify push, apify call, and the rest. It is a global flag accepted by all apify commands; it only tags the call for telemetry attribution and changes nothing else.