Diy Project Scraper
Pricing
Pay per usage
Diy Project Scraper
Diy Project Scraper. Extract structured data with automatic pagination, proxy rotation, and JSON/CSV export. Pay only for results.
What does this actor do?
The DIY Project Scraper is an Apify actor that extracts project guides, materials lists, and instructions from Instructables, one of the largest DIY and maker community websites. It searches for projects matching your query and optionally filters by category (circuits, workshop, craft, cooking, living, outside, or teachers). For each project found, the actor extracts the title, author, difficulty level, view and favorite counts, materials needed, estimated completion time, and the direct URL.
Why use this actor?
Instructables hosts hundreds of thousands of DIY projects spanning electronics, woodworking, crafts, cooking, and more. Whether you are a maker looking for inspiration, a content creator researching project ideas, a retailer analyzing popular materials, or an educator gathering classroom project options, this actor provides structured, machine-readable data that would take hours to compile manually. The extracted materials lists are particularly useful for cost analysis, inventory planning, and product recommendation systems.
How does it work?
The actor uses CheerioCrawler to first navigate the Instructables search results page for your specified query and category. It then collects links to individual project pages and visits each one to extract detailed information. On each project detail page, the actor parses the title, author, view and favorite counts, supply/materials lists, and estimates difficulty based on the number of steps. Results are structured and pushed to the Apify dataset for easy export in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other formats.
Input parameters
- searchQuery (string): The search term for finding DIY projects. Default:
"woodworking". - category (string, optional): Filter by Instructables category. Options:
circuits,workshop,craft,cooking,living,outside,teachers. - maxResults (integer): Maximum number of projects to scrape. Default:
30.
Output fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| title | Project title |
| author | Author/creator username |
| category | Project category |
| difficulty | Estimated difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced |
| views | Number of views on the project page |
| favorites | Number of times the project was favorited |
| materialsList | Comma-separated list of required materials |
| estimatedTime | Estimated completion time |
| url | Direct link to the project page |
Cost and performance
The actor runs with a default memory of 1024 MB and typically completes within 1-3 minutes depending on the number of projects requested. At the Mid PPE tier, each result costs approximately $0.00075. Processing 30 projects usually takes about 2 minutes as each project detail page is fetched individually.
Tips and best practices
- Use specific search queries for better results. Instead of "projects," try "Arduino LED lamp" or "beginner woodworking shelf."
- Combine the category filter with your search query to narrow results to a specific domain.
- The materials lists are ideal for building cost calculators or shopping list generators.
- Schedule weekly runs with trending search terms to discover new popular projects.
- Check out the 3D Print Model Scraper and the Maker Space Finder for complementary maker data.
- Export results to Google Sheets to create a shared project ideas database for your makerspace or classroom.
