Example Apify actor in Rust

Minimal example for developing Apify actor in Rust programming language. The code is open source.

The example:

• Reads user provided URL from input
• Does HTTP request to get HTML from this URL
• Saves HTML into OUTPUT record in Key Value Store

This actor works both on Apify platform and locally.

Local usage

For local usage, you need to:

1. Clone the repository
2. Install Rust
3. Create local storage with apify init or manually create folder path apify_storage/key_value_stores/default/
4. Add INPUT.json file input inside this path that looks like this:

1{
2    "url": "https://apify.com"
3}

5. Build and run the solution with cargo run
6. You can find OUTPUT.html next to INPUT.json

Current problems

• Apify currently doesn't allow increasing memory for builds so they sometimes fails by running out of memory
• Apify caches the Docker images on its servers. Rust is not yet used much there so a lot of runs have slow cold starts.

Where next?

If you want to see more complex scraping project in Rust, check Rust Scraper which is also open source