Changelog

Star and compare your favorite Actors

We've introduced a new "starring" feature for Actors! Now, you can star any Actor in Apify Console, creating a personalized list of your favorite ones. Compare the popularity of Actors with the total number of stars they’ve received, or filter to view only the ones you've starred.

⭐ Why it matters:

• Community insight: See which Actors the community loves, helping you choose popular and trusted solutions.
• Personalization: Customize your Console experience by filtering - focus on the Actors that match your projects.

Explore, star, and enjoy a tailored Apify experience!

Introducing Actor Standby Mode for real-time API responses

We’ve also launched Actor Standby Mode, enabling your Actors to function as real-time API servers. This enhancement allows your Actors to remain active in the background, ready to process incoming HTTP requests instantly.

🚀 Key Features:

• Immediate responsiveness: Actors in Standby Mode are always prepared to handle requests, eliminating startup delays.
• Flexible input handling: Supports standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) and accept inputs via query strings or request bodies.
• Automatic scaling: The system dynamically adjusts to incoming request volumes, ensuring optimal performance.
• Customizable settings: Configure parameters such as maximum concurrent requests, desired requests per run, memory allocation, and idle timeouts to suit your application's needs.
• Ready-to-use templates: Jumpstart your development with JavaScript and Python templates designed for Standby Mode, making setup easier than ever.

For detailed guidance, refer to our Standby Mode documentation.

Introducing Social Media Hashtag Research - a brand new Actor that helps you get data about posts with specific hashtags all over social media. No need to use multiple scrapers for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube hashtags anymore.

Here's some of the data you’ll get with Social Media Hashtag Research :

• URLs
• captions
• timestamps
• number of likes and dislikes
• views and comments count
• basic profile info

Try it out and automate your social media research!

We launched our open-source web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee in August 2022 and got an amazing response from the JavaScript community. With many early adopters in its initial days, we got valuable feedback, which gave Crawlee a strong base for its success.

Since the launch, the feedback we’ve received most often has been to build Crawlee in Python so that the Python community can use all the features the JavaScript community does.

With all these requests in mind and to simplify the life of Python web scraping developers, we’re launching Crawlee for Python today.

The new library is still in beta, and we're looking for early adopters. Here's how you can help:

Check it out, give us feedback and star the library on Github! ⭐️

Support the release on ProductHunt 🚀

We've improved bulk actions all over Apify Console. You can now:

• Change run options (build, memory, timeout) when resurrecting multiple runs at once.
• Abort multiple runs gracefully
• Configure alerts for multiple Actors and Actor tasks at the same time.

We've enhanced the OpenGraph images displayed when you share your developer profile to social networks.

And we've also made notification settings more flexible. These now support usage alerts and monthly developer summaries.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Apify's new Request Queue storage system. This update enhances our platform by unlocking new use cases and addressing common issues with previous request queue functionalities.

New use cases

Distributed scraping: The new system integrates a locking mechanism that allows multiple clients to process the same request queue without duplicating work. This feature is crucial for distributed scraping tasks, where multiple Actor runs scrape one request queue.

Batch operations: The new storage system supports batch operations, allowing multiple requests to be enqueued or dequeued in a single operation. This reduces network latency and accelerates the processing of large volumes of requests.

Unlimited data retention: Unlike the previous system where each request had a fixed expiration date, the new system allows for indefinite retention of requests in named queues. This feature facilitates incremental crawling by allowing you to append new URLs to the queue and pick up where you left off in subsequent runs.

For more detailed information on the new Request Queue system, please refer to our blog post. To learn how to implement these features directly, you can explore the Apify documentation or review the tutorials available at Apify Academy.