apify/quick-start

This is a simple Apify act that contains the basic boilerplate that you need when creating a new act hosted in a Git repository. Fill free to copy it, change it and use it in your acts.

Are you missing anything? Something not clear? Please let us know at support@apify.com

To run the act in your local environment, simply run the following commands:

1npm install
2npm run test-local

In order to test the build of the Docker image, run:

docker build ./

On success, the command will produce something like:

1...
2Removing intermediate container 22915a918e4c
3Step 6/6 : CMD node main.js
4 ---> Running in 7288f9a12cf0
5 ---> 0d82ea8a648d
6Removing intermediate container 7288f9a12cf0
7Successfully built XYZ

After that you can run the built Docker image locally using:

docker run -e "APIFY_DEV_KEY_VALUE_STORE_DIR=./kv-store-dev/" XYZ

Where XYZ is ID of the Docker image built in the previous step. Please see below for a detailed description of the APIFY_DEV_KEY_VALUE_STORE_DIR environment variable.

If there is any problem with the built image, you might try troubleshooting it by starting the container in interactive mode using:

docker run -it XYZ /bin/bash

Note that this requires a base Docker image that contains bash or some other interactive shell.

main.js

Contains the source code of the act in Node.js 7+.

package.json

The file used by NPM to maintain meta-data about the package, such as list of dependencies. See NPM docs for more details.

Dockerfile

Contains instructions for Docker how to build the image for the act. For more information, see Dockerfile reference.

README.md

The readme file is used to generate a long description of the act that is displayed in the Apify library as well as on the project's GitHub page.

kv-store-dev

When running the act on the Apify cloud, the act is automatically assigned a key-value store that is used to store act's input, output or any other data. The kv-store-dev directory is used to emulate the key-value store during local development of your act. The files in the directory represent the records in the key-value store - the name of each file corresponds to its key and the content to the value.

For example, calling Apify.getValue('INPUT') will return the content of the kv-store-dev/INPUT file parsed as JSON. Similarly, calling Apify.setValue('OUTPUT', ...) will write a file to kv-store-dev/OUTPUT.

To make this work, the reference to the kv-store-dev directory must be passed to the act process as the APIFY_DEV_KEY_VALUE_STORE_DIR environment variable. You can achieve that by starting the act using the following command:

npm run test-local

When reading the files from the directory, the Apify.getValue() function assumes they have application/json content type and parses them to JSON. If you want use a different content type, please set also the APIFY_DEV_KEY_VALUE_STORE_CONTENT_TYPE environment variable.

For more information, see the apify NPM package documentation.