apify-actor-development

A development guide for Apify Actors, which are cloud programs packaged to run isolated tasks such as web scraping, automation, or data processing. Actors accept structured JSON input and produce structured JSON output.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, modify, troubleshoot, or deploy Apify Actors.
Why use it?
It gives existing or new Actor code a consistent path for local testing, debugging, and cloud deployment. It also explains the setup checks needed before changing an Actor.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/apify/apify-claude-code-plugin/apify-actor-development
Any agent
npx skills add apify/apify-claude-code-plugin --skill apify-actor-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apify/apify-claude-code-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,905 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00045 $0.02905
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01452
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00581
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00291

Measured yesterday against content hash d238c4692ec7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

apify-actor-development scanned grade C with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Downloads and executes remote codehighSupply chain

curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.

> (e.g. `curl … | bash` or `irm … | iex`). Always use a package manager.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

> (e.g. `curl … | bash` or `irm … | iex`). Always use a package manager.
Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to apify-actor-development — 6 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/apify-actor-development/SKILL.md · 226 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 226 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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):

# Preferred: install via a package manager (provides integrity checks)
npm install -g apify-cli

# Or (Mac): brew install apify-cli

Security note: Do NOT install the CLI by piping remote scripts to a shell (e.g. curl … | bash or irm … | iex). Always use a package manager.

When the apify CLI is installed, check that it is logged in with:

# Auth check — do NOT pipe to /dev/null, you need to see errors
apify info 2>&1

If not logged in, authenticate using OAuth (opens browser):

apify login

If browser login isn't available (headless environment or CI), the CLI automatically reads APIFY_TOKEN from the environment. Ensure the env var is exported and run any apify command - no explicit login needed. If the user doesn't have a token, generate one at https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations.

Read the full file on GitHub · 226 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 226 lines · 45 tokens per session scan C d238c4692ec7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apify-actor-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository apify/apify-claude-code-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 2,905 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 2 findings (downloads and executes remote code, makes network calls). It is 98% identical to apify-actor-development, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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