Crates.io Scraper

Scrape Crates.io — the official Rust package registry — at scale via the public REST API. Search crates, look up exact names, browse categories or keywords, list a user's published crates, or pull reverse dependencies for any crate. Returns full metadata: downloads, version history, license, repository, categories, keywords, owners, and more.

What this actor does

• Six modes:

  • search — free-text query over the crate catalog
  • byCrates — exact crate-name lookup (one record per name)
  • byCategory — browse a category slug (58 categories supported)
  • byKeyword — browse a keyword tag (cli, async, wasm, etc.)
  • userCrates — every crate published by a given crates.io user
  • reverseDeps — every crate that depends on a given source crate

• Sort orders: relevance, alphabetical, recent updates, recent downloads (90-day), all-time downloads, newest

• Powerful filters: all-time download range, 90-day download range, version-count range, updated-since-days, substring keyword match

• Optional enrichments: full version history (per-crate), owner users + teams

• Pure HTTP via the public crates.io/api/v1 JSON API — no proxy, no cookies, no API key

Output per crate

Field	Description
id	Crate name (same as name)
name	Crate name
description	Short description from Cargo.toml
homepage	Project homepage URL
documentation	External docs URL (usually docs.rs/...)
repository	Source repository URL
downloads	All-time downloads
recentDownloads	Downloads in the last 90 days
maxVersion	Highest version published (incl. pre-release)
maxStableVersion	Highest stable version
newestVersion	Most recently published version
defaultVersion	The version shown on the crate page
versionCount	Total number of published versions
yanked	true if the latest version is yanked
categories[]	Category slugs
categoryTitles[]	Human-readable category names (detail mode)
keywords[]	Keyword tags
createdAt	First-publish timestamp (ISO 8601)
updatedAt	Latest-update timestamp (ISO 8601)
exactMatch	Whether the search query matched this crate's name exactly
badges[]	Crate badges
links{}	Absolute URLs to upstream sub-resources (versions, owners, etc.)
crateUrl	https://crates.io/crates/{name}
docsRsUrl	https://docs.rs/{name}
versions[]	(optional) Per-version detail: num, downloads, license, crateSize, publishedAt, publishedBy, features, rustVersion, edition
owners{}	(optional) users[] + teams[] lists
recordType	crate (or reverseDependency for that mode)
scrapedAt	ISO 8601 timestamp

Empty fields are omitted — every key in the output has a real value.

reverseDeps mode output

When mode=reverseDeps, each record is a consumer crate (one that depends on the source crate), with: name, crateUrl, versionNum, requirement, kind (normal/dev/build), optional, defaultFeatures, features[], consumerDownloads, license, publishedAt, plus sourceCrate for context.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	One of search, byCrates, byCategory, byKeyword, userCrates, reverseDeps
searchQuery	string	tokio	Free-text query (mode=search)
crateNames	array	–	Exact crate names (mode=byCrates)
category	enum	–	Category slug (58 options)
keyword	string	–	Keyword tag
userLogin	string	–	Crates.io username (mode=userCrates)
sourceCrate	string	–	Crate name (mode=reverseDeps)
sortBy	enum	relevance	relevance, alphabetical, recent-updates, recent-downloads, downloads, new
minDownloads / maxDownloads	int	–	All-time download bounds
minRecentDownloads / maxRecentDownloads	int	–	90-day download bounds
minVersionCount / maxVersionCount	int	–	Version-count bounds
updatedSinceDays	int	–	Only emit crates updated within N days
containsKeyword	string	–	Case-insensitive substring filter
includeVersions	bool	false	Fetch full version history per crate
includeOwners	bool	false	Fetch owner users + teams per crate
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap (1–5000)

Example use cases

Find the most-downloaded async runtimes

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "asynchronous",
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Top CLI crates updated in the last 30 days

{
  "mode": "byKeyword",
  "keyword": "cli",
  "sortBy": "recent-updates",
  "updatedSinceDays": 30,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Lookup specific crates with full version history

{
  "mode": "byCrates",
  "crateNames": ["serde", "tokio", "clap"],
  "includeVersions": true,
  "includeOwners": true
}

All crates by David Tolnay

{
  "mode": "userCrates",
  "userLogin": "dtolnay",
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Reverse dependencies of clap

{
  "mode": "reverseDeps",
  "sourceCrate": "clap",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Data Source

All data comes from the public crates.io REST API (https://crates.io/api/v1). The API is rate-limited by user-agent — this actor identifies itself politely per the crates.io data-access policy.

No authentication. No proxy required. No cookies. Works on the Apify free plan.

Limitations

• The crates.io reverse-dependencies endpoint can 500 for extremely popular crates (e.g. serde_json, tokio). The actor surfaces this via a status message and asks you to pick a smaller source crate.
• Crates.io paginates search results; this actor stops after 2–3 consecutive empty pages (after filters) or when maxItems is hit.
• Versions enrichment is capped at the 50 most recent versions per crate to keep payloads reasonable.

FAQ

Q: Do I need an API key? No. crates.io's REST API is fully public.

Q: Does it work without proxy? Yes. The actor runs without any proxy configuration.

Q: How fresh is the data? Real-time. Every record is built from a live API call.

Q: Can I get download stats per day? The per-version daily download stats are available via the /crates/{name}/downloads upstream endpoint. To keep dataset payloads compact, this actor surfaces aggregated downloads (all-time) and recentDownloads (90-day) on every record. Daily breakdown is exposed only when needed and is out of scope for this version.

Q: Why am I missing some fields for some crates? Empty fields are dropped from the output (no nulls, no empty strings). If a crate has no homepage or no repository, those keys won't appear on its record.