Dev.to & Forem Content Scraper

Extract articles, full post bodies, nested comments, tags, users and organizations from Dev.to (and any Forem-powered community) using the official public API — no account, no API token, no proxy spend.

One actor covers the whole Dev.to content surface, with clean flattened output ready for analytics, RAG pipelines, and content research.

What it does

• Articles — pull posts by tag, by author, or from the global feed, sorted popular / latest, or ranked as top of the last N days
• Full article bodies — optionally enrich every article with its complete body_markdown + body_html (most competitors only give you the list view)
• Comments — the full nested comment tree for any article, flattened with depth + parent_id_code so you can rebuild the thread
• Tags catalog — the Dev.to tag taxonomy with colors and summaries, for discovery
• Users — public profile lookup by username
• Organizations — org profiles, plus optionally all of an org's articles
• Unified, flat output — consistent snake_case fields across every mode; a type field labels each row

Why this actor

Other Dev.to actors	Gap	This actor
Most "Dev.to articles" scrapers (≤42 users)	Articles list only — no full body, no comments	Optional full body_markdown, plus a dedicated comments mode
Article-only scrapers	No users / tags / organizations	6 modes in one actor
Thin/unmaintained clones (~2 users each)	Crash on a bad tag or rate-limit, flagged "under maintenance"	Never-crash: retries transient errors, degrades gracefully, always exits clean
—	Nested comments returned as raw JSON	Comments flattened with depth + parent_id_code + plain-text body_text

Dev.to hosts millions of developer articles and is one of the most-linked technical content platforms on the web — a rich, permissively-public source for developer-trend analysis, competitive content research, and AI training/RAG corpora.

Modes & inputs

Mode	Uses	Returns
articles	tags, usernames, sortBy, topDays, maxResults, fetchFullContent	Article rows (optionally with full body)
article_detail	articleIds	Full article incl. body_markdown / body_html
comments	articleIds	Flattened nested comment tree
tags	maxResults	Tag catalog
users	usernames	Public profiles
organizations	usernames, includeOrgArticles, maxResults	Org profile (+ optional articles)

Example input

{
  "mode": "articles",
  "tags": ["javascript", "webdev", "react"],
  "sortBy": "popular",
  "topDays": 7,
  "maxResults": 200,
  "fetchFullContent": true
}

Get every comment on two articles:

{ "mode": "comments", "articleIds": ["4100283", "4123925"] }

Output fields

Article

Field	Type	Description
id	integer	Dev.to article ID (use in article_detail / comments)
title	string	Article title
description	string	Short summary
url	string	Canonical dev.to permalink
tags	array	Tag names
published_at	string	ISO 8601 publish timestamp
reading_time_minutes	integer	Estimated read time
comments_count	integer	Number of comments
public_reactions_count	integer	Total reactions
author_username / author_name	string	Author identity
author_github / author_twitter	string	Author social handles
organization_username / organization_name	string	Publishing org (if any)
cover_image / social_image	string	Image URLs
body_markdown / body_html	string	Full post content (only with fetchFullContent or article_detail)

Comment

Field	Type	Description
id_code	string	Comment ID
article_id	integer	Parent article
depth	integer	Nesting depth (0 = top-level)
parent_id_code	string	Parent comment (null at top level)
body_html / body_text	string	Comment body (HTML + plain text)
author_username / author_name	string	Commenter identity
created_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp

User / Organization

id, username, name, url, summary, location, website_url, joined_at, twitter_username, github_username, profile_image (organizations also include tag_line, tech_stack, story).

Tag

id, name, url, bg_color_hex, text_color_hex, short_summary.

Common use cases

• Developer-trend analysis — what topics/tags are surging this week (topDays)
• Content research & SEO — mine top-performing posts and titles by tag
• RAG / LLM training corpora — full markdown bodies + threaded comments as clean text
• Competitive intelligence — track a company's dev-relations org and its authors
• Community analytics — comment-thread structure, engagement, and contributor mapping
• Newsletter / digest automation — pull the latest or top articles for a niche on a schedule

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.001 per dataset item (article, comment, user, tag, or organization row).

Example: 5,000 articles ≈ $5. Comments and tags are billed the same per-row rate.

Reliability

• Keyless & proxy-free — Dev.to's public REST API is designed for logged-out reads; zero proxy cost
• Never-crash design — transient errors (429 / 5xx / network) are retried with exponential backoff (honoring Retry-After); a bad tag or missing user is skipped, not fatal
• Deliver-then-charge — results are written to the dataset before any charge; you never pay for rows you didn't receive
• Respects your limit — stops cleanly when the run's charge limit is reached
• Polite pacing — gentle request spacing so runs stay well-behaved against the API

Data compliance

This actor reads only public, logged-out data through Dev.to / Forem's official public API. No credentials are used and no private or gated content is accessed. Suitable for research and business use under the platform's terms for public data.