Skillshare Courses Scraper

This Apify actor scrapes course listings from Skillshare.com using Crawlee's CheerioCrawler and gotScraping.

Features

• Scrapes Skillshare browse pages and course detail pages (no browser required).
• Extracts course information including title, instructor, rating, student count, duration, and tools used.
• Handles pagination until the requested number of results is reached.
• Optional detail scraping mode to fetch full course descriptions.
• Saves results to an Apify dataset using a consistent schema.

Input

The actor accepts the following input fields (all optional unless noted):

• startUrl / url / startUrls — Specific Skillshare browse URL(s) to start from. If provided, these override search parameters.
• keyword (string) — Search term for courses (e.g., "AI", "photography").
• category (string) — Course category to browse (e.g., "ai-for-creativity-inspiration").
• results_wanted (integer) — Maximum number of courses to collect. Default: 20.
• max_pages (integer) — Safety cap on number of browse pages to visit. Default: 10.
• collectDetails (boolean) — If true, the actor will visit each course detail page to extract full description. Default: true.
• proxyConfiguration — Proxy settings (use Apify Proxy with RESIDENTIAL group for best results).

Output

Each item saved to the dataset follows this structure:

{
	"title": "AI for Designers: How It Works, Prompt Writing & Design Inspiration",
	"instructor": "Lindsay Marsh",
	"rating": 4.7,
	"review_count": 23,
	"student_count": "2.7k",
	"duration": "1h 8m",
	"tools": "Adobe Firefly",
	"description": "Full course description...",
	"url": "https://www.skillshare.com/en/classes/ai-for-designers-how-it-works-prompt-writing-and-design-inspiration/1094556645"
}

Usage Examples

Scrape AI courses from a specific category

{
  "startUrl": "https://www.skillshare.com/en/browse/ai-for-creativity-inspiration?parent=ai-innovation",
  "results_wanted": 50,
  "collectDetails": true
}

Search for courses by keyword

{
  "keyword": "photography",
  "results_wanted": 20,
  "max_pages": 5
}

Tips

• Use RESIDENTIAL proxies for best results as Skillshare may block datacenter IPs.
• Start with collectDetails: false for faster scraping of basic course info.
• The actor automatically handles pagination on browse pages.
• For large result sets, increase max_pages but monitor your proxy usage.

Sample Output

Course Title	Instructor	Rating	Students	Duration	Tools
AI for Designers: How It Works...	Lindsay Marsh	4.7 (23)	2.7k	1h 8m	Adobe Firefly
YouTube Channel Growth: How To Use ChatGPT...	Dylan Reeves-Fellows	5 (2)	214	1h 5m	ChatGPT

Notes

• The actor uses CheerioCrawler with gotScraping; no additional local packages are required beyond those in package.json.
• On Apify platform, provide proxyConfiguration with RESIDENTIAL proxies for reliable scraping.
• If Skillshare changes their markup, selectors in src/main.js may need updates.