My Actor

A JavaScript (Node.js) template for scraping data from a single web page. You provide a URL via the input, and the actor fetches the page, parses it, and stores the extracted data in an Apify dataset. The template is pre-configured to extract page headings but is designed to be easily modified for any scraping task.

Key Features

• Apify SDK: The core toolkit for building and running the actor.
• Input Schema: A defined schema for validating the actor's input (primarily the target URL).
• Structured Storage: Output is saved to an Apify Dataset for easy access and export.
• Axios Client: Used for reliable HTTP requests to fetch page HTML.
• Cheerio: A fast, jQuery-like library for parsing and extracting data from HTML.

Input / Output

Input: The actor expects an input object containing the url of the page to scrape, as defined by its input schema.

Output: The scraped data is stored as individual items in the actor's default dataset. The default template stores an array of page headings (h1 through h6), but you will modify this to match your needs.

How to Use

Basic Operation

1. Provide the target page URL in the actor's input.
2. Run the actor. It will:
   • Fetch the page HTML using axios.get(url).
   • Load the HTML into Cheerio for parsing (cheerio.load(response.data)).
   • Execute the extraction logic (by default, selecting all heading elements).
   • Save the results to the dataset via Actor.pushData().

Customization

The main scraping logic is in the Cheerio parsing step. To scrape different data, edit the selector and data extraction code. For example, the default code is:

$("h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6").each((_i, element) => {...});

Change the selector (e.g., $(".product-name")) and the extracted properties within the loop to match your target data.

Local Development

To modify the actor locally, use the Apify CLI to pull the source code:

1. Install the Apify CLI:
   bash npm -g install apify-cli
   or
   bash 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 JavaScript documentation
• Apify Platform documentation
• Tutorials: Web scraping in Node.js with Axios and Cheerio, Web scraping with Cheerio in 2023
• Community: Join our developer community on Discord