apify-actor-development

A development skill for creating, changing, debugging, and deploying Apify Actors. An Actor is an isolated cloud program that accepts JSON input and produces structured results for scraping, automation, or data processing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start or modify an Actor, troubleshoot its code, prepare its JSON inputs and outputs, verify its project setup, and deploy it to Apify.
Why use it?
It provides a defined workflow for building these cloud programs and checking their required project metadata. It supports jobs that may run briefly, for hours, or continuously.

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-cursor-plugin/apify-actor-development
Any agent
npx skills add apify/apify-cursor-plugin --skill apify-actor-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apify/apify-cursor-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 2,892 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.02892
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01446
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00289

Measured 2d ago against content hash dc2b16f8e7ec, 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 2d ago.

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

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

apify/skills/apify-actor-development/SKILL.md · 222 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 222 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 · 222 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. 2d ago First seen · 222 lines · 45 tokens per session scan C dc2b16f8e7ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apify-actor-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository apify/apify-cursor-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 2,892 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). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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