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.
npx agentmods add skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/apify-actor-buildernpx skills add thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills --skill apify-actor-buildergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/apify-actor-builder)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/apify-actor-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/apify-actor-builder.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00122 | $0.01819 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00061 | $0.00910 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00364 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00182 |
Grade A, and why
apify-actor-builder scanned grade A with 0 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 4d 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.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Apify Actor Builder
How to turn a working scraper into a hosted, schedulable, billable Apify Actor in Python. This skill is about packaging and deployment — the scraping logic itself lives in anti-bot-scraping and web-scraping-playbook.
When to build an Actor (vs. a one-off script)
A plain script is fine for a single extraction you run by hand. Build an Actor when you need:
- Recurring runs — scheduling, retries, and run history without your own cron/infra.
- Managed hosting — proxies, memory, logging, and a dataset store handled for you.
- Monetization — list it on the Apify Store and bill users pay-per-result.
If it's one-off, public, and unprotected, write an HTTP script instead.
Directory structure
An Actor is self-contained. No shared utilities across actors.
my-scraper/
├── .actor/
│ ├── actor.json # name, version, memory, timeout, dockerfile, schemas
│ └── input_schema.json # the form users fill out
├── my_actor/
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── __main__.py # entry: asyncio.run(main())
│ └── main.py # core logic
├── Dockerfile
├── requirements.txt
└── README.md
__main__.py is just the entrypoint:
import asyncio
from .main import main
asyncio.run(main())
Choose a runtime pattern (cheapest first)
Always climb the ladder HTTP → impit → Camoufox → Playwright. Each step costs more compute and proxy.
| Pattern | Base image | Memory | Use when |
|---|---|---|---|
| A — Pure HTTP | apify/actor-python:3.14 |
256MB | API, RSS, embedded JSON, or server-rendered HTML. httpx + beautifulsoup4. Preferred, cheapest. |
| B — HTTP + impit TLS | apify/actor-python:3.14 |
256MB | Site blocks on TLS/JA3 fingerprint. impit.AsyncClient(browser='chrome') spoofs Chrome at the HTTP level — no browser. |
| C — Playwright + Crawlee | apify/actor-python-playwright:3.14-1.58.0 |
2048MB | You need a real browser and the Crawlee crawler framework (queues, sessions). |
| D — Camoufox stealth | apify/actor-python-playwright:3.12 |
2048MB | DataDome / Cloudflare Turnstile / Akamai / PerimeterX. camoufox (hardened Firefox) with humanize=True. |
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 149 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A 4193a95f8956
apify-actor-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills (3 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 1,819 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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