F1 API Actor

A Python-based Apify Actor template for scraping data from a single web page. It takes a target URL as input, fetches the page using HTTPX, parses its HTML with Beautiful Soup, and outputs structured data to an Apify dataset. The template is pre-configured to extract page headings (H1-H6), but you can modify the code to scrape any elements.

Key Features

• Apify SDK for Python: Provides the core framework for building and running the Actor.
• Input Schema: Validates the input, which must include the target page URL.
• HTTPX: Handles fast, asynchronous HTTP requests to fetch page HTML.
• Beautiful Soup 4: Parses HTML and extracts data using Pythonic methods.
• Dataset Storage: Automatically stores scraped results in a structured Apify dataset for easy access and export.
• Request Queue: Includes infrastructure for managing URLs to scrape, useful for extending to multi-page scraping.

Input/Output

Input (via Actor.get_input())
The Actor expects a JSON input containing the URL to scrape.

{
  "url": "https://example.com"
}

Output
The scraped data is pushed to an Apify dataset. By default, each item is an object containing a page heading.

{
  "heading": "Example Domain",
  "tag": "h1"
}

You can change the output structure by editing the parsing logic in the main script.

How to Use

1. Configure Input: In the Apify Console, set the input to a JSON object with the url of the page you want to scrape.
2. Run the Actor: Start the run. The Actor will fetch the page, parse it, and save the results.
3. Access Data: After the run finishes, you can view, export (JSON, CSV, etc.), or access the dataset via API.
4. Customize: To scrape different data, edit the Python code, specifically the Beautiful Soup parsing logic inside the main function.

The core scraping flow in the script is:

# 1. Get input URL
input = await Actor.get_input()
# 2. Fetch page HTML
async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
    response = await client.get(input['url'])
# 3. Parse with Beautiful Soup
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'lxml')
# 4. Extract data (example: headings)
for heading in soup.find_all(["h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6"]):
    # 5. Store in dataset
    await Actor.push_data({"heading": heading.text, "tag": heading.name})

Local Development

To develop locally, use the Apify CLI to pull the Actor code:

1. Install the CLI:
   bash npm -g install apify-cli # or: brew install apify-cli
2. Pull the Actor using its unique name or ID (found in the Apify Console):
   bash apify pull <ActorId>

Resources

• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Input schema documentation
• BeautifulSoup Scraper
• Python tutorials in Academy
• Web scraping with Beautiful Soup and Requests