Recipe Extractor (Apify Actor)

Give it public recipe page URLs, get back clean, normalized recipe data — name, ingredients, step-by-step instructions, prep/cook/total time, yield, calories, rating, author, category, cuisine — from JSON-LD Recipe. HTML-only (no headless browser), fast, cheap. Ideal for recipe apps, meal-planners, nutrition datasets, and food-content aggregation.

Input

{ "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/21014/good-old-fashioned-pancakes/" }], "maxConcurrency": 5, "maxPages": 100 }

maxPages capped at 200, maxConcurrency at 20.

Output — one STABLE record per URL (ok and error rows share the shape)

{
  "status": "ok",
  "found": true,
  "complete": true,
  "page_type": "recipe",
  "name": "Classic Pancakes",
  "ingredients": ["2 cups flour", "2 eggs", "1.5 cups milk", "1 tbsp sugar"],
  "ingredient_count": 4,
  "steps": ["Mix the dry ingredients.", "Whisk in eggs and milk.", "Cook until golden."],
  "step_count": 3,
  "prep_time_min": 10,
  "cook_time_min": 15,
  "total_time_min": 25,
  "recipe_yield": "4 servings",
  "calories": 320,
  "rating_value": 4.7,
  "rating_count": 1204,
  "author": "Chef Sam",
  "image": "https://.../pancakes.jpg",
  "category": "Breakfast",
  "cuisine": "American",
  "keywords": null,
  "requested_url": "...", "final_url": "...", "http_status": 200,
  "fields_found": ["name","ingredients","steps","total_time_min","recipe_yield","calories","rating_value","author","image"],
  "missing_reason": null,
  "extracted_at": "2026-05-29T..."
}

ISO-8601 durations (PT1H30M) are converted to minutes; total time falls back to prep+cook. found:false means no Recipe markup (e.g. a blog index or JS-rendered page). Failed fetches return the same keys with status:"error" + error.

Run locally / test

npm install
npm test     # unit tests on the pure extractor (node:test)

Publish to Apify (account-holder's step)

$npm install -g apify-cli && apify login && apify push

Keep free initially; monetize later via the adult account-holder once it shows repeat usage.

Notes / safety

• SSRF-guarded, robots-respecting, rate-limited, cost-capped (shared src/lib/actor_runner.js).
• Stores only derived recipe fields — no raw page bodies / PII.
• HTML-only: JS-rendered recipe sites return found:false with missing_reason. Core logic in src/extract.js (pure, unit-tested).