VK Posts Scraper

Extracts wall posts from public VK profiles and communities, with every field VK exposes for a post: text, author, engagement stats, attachment URLs, repost chains, geotags, poll results and — optionally — full comment threads.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
vkTargets	string[]	required	Handles (durov), profile/community URLs (https://vk.com/kinopoisk), signed owner IDs (-40316705), or direct post links (https://vk.com/wall1_45678).
accessToken	string (secret)	—	VK API token with the wall scope. Strongly recommended — see Extraction modes.
maxItems	integer	500	Hard cap on posts stored across all targets.
postsPerTarget	integer	—	Optional per-target cap.
publishedAfter	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD or ISO-8601. Pagination stops once older posts are reached.
publishedBefore	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD or ISO-8601. A bare date includes the whole day.
postFilter	all | owner | others	all	Which posts to read from the wall (API mode only).
includeComments	boolean	false	Fetch comment threads, including replies. API mode only.
maxComments	integer	100	Comments fetched per post.
includeRawPost	boolean	false	Attach the unmodified VK payload as rawPost.
proxyConfiguration	object	Residential	VK blocks most datacenter IP ranges.

{
    "vkTargets": ["kinopoisk", "https://vk.com/durov"],
    "accessToken": "vk1.a.…",
    "maxItems": 200,
    "publishedAfter": "2024-01-01",
    "includeComments": true
}

Extraction modes

API mode (an accessToken is supplied) calls the official VK API — wall.get, wall.getById, wall.getComments. This is the mode the Actor is built around and the only one that returns complete data. Get a token by creating a standalone VK application and issuing a user token with the wall scope.

HTML mode (no token) scrapes m.vk.com in a browser. It is a genuine fallback, not a substitute: VK's public HTML has no attachment URLs beyond thumbnails, often no view counts, and dates that frequently cannot be resolved to an exact timestamp (those posts get postedAt: null and a raw postedAtLabel instead). Closed walls and single-post targets are not reachable at all.

Neither mode ever fabricates a value. A field VK does not return is null, and a failed extraction fails the run rather than producing placeholder data.

Output

One dataset item per post:

{
    "postId": "-22822305_1070789",
    "ownerId": -22822305,
    "authorId": -22822305,
    "author": {
        "id": -22822305,
        "type": "group",
        "name": "Кинопоиск",
        "screenName": "kinopoisk",
        "url": "https://vk.com/kinopoisk",
        "photo": "https://sun.userapi.com/…",
        "isVerified": true,
        "membersCount": 2100000
    },
    "text": "Post body…",
    "postedAt": "2024-06-01T09:30:00.000Z",
    "editedAt": null,
    "sourceUrl": "https://vk.com/wall-22822305_1070789",
    "stats": { "likes": 1240, "comments": 87, "reposts": 33, "views": 98000, "engagement": 1360 },
    "mediaTypes": ["photo", "video"],
    "mediaCount": 2,
    "attachments": [
        { "type": "photo", "id": "-22822305_457301", "url": "https://sun.userapi.com/…jpg", "width": 2560, "height": 1440, "sizes": [] },
        { "type": "video", "id": "-22822305_456789", "url": "https://vk.com/video-22822305_456789", "title": "Trailer", "durationSeconds": 132, "viewsCount": 45000 }
    ],
    "isRepost": false,
    "repostChain": [],
    "isPinned": false,
    "isAd": false,
    "geo": null,
    "postSource": { "type": "vk", "platform": null },
    "target": "kinopoisk",
    "targetType": "handle",
    "scrapedAt": "2024-06-02T11:00:00.000Z"
}

Attachment objects carry type-specific fields — poll has question/answers/votesCount, link has url/title/description, doc has extension/sizeBytes, and so on. Unmapped attachment types still appear with their type, id and isKnownType: false, so nothing is silently dropped. With includeComments, each post also gets a comments array whose entries carry the commenter, text, likes and nested replies.

Limits and behaviour

• Rate limits. VK allows roughly 3 requests/second per user token; the Actor runs API requests one at a time and retries error code 6 with backoff.
• Budgets. maxItems counts posts, not requests, and is enforced globally across targets. Posts are de-duplicated by ownerId_postId.
• Failure. A run that stores zero posts fails with a diagnostic message instead of finishing "successfully" with an empty dataset. An invalid or expired token fails the run immediately.
• Scope. Only public walls, or walls the supplied token can read. This Actor does not attempt to access private profiles or bypass VK's access controls.

Development

npm install
npm test     # unit + handler tests, no network access
npm run lint
apify run    # requires an INPUT in storage/key_value_stores/default/