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All is well at Apify! We hope that you’re staying safe and well too.
We’re in full work-from-home mode, and since we already support remote work by default, the transition has been smooth for us. All systems are designed to run without any manual intervention and our staff are fully operational and ready to support you. So apart from now having fully remote meetings, it’s business as usual here.
Read on to find out what’s new at Apify. And for the latest updates, just follow us on Twitter.
By the way, if you’re interested in security measures at Apify, take a look at our new security whitepaper.
Joining the fight against COVID-19
We wanted to do our part in the fight against COVID-19, so we turned official pages with statistics into APIs that can be used by other apps. Use these coronavirus statistics APIs to get the latest data from multiple countries.
Check out our blog post to learn more.
We’d also like to offer free compute units to journalists as well as scientific and research teams so they can get the information they need to combat this virus. If you’re interested in this offer, just write us at hello@apify.com.
Schedules API
One of the most requested features is finally here! Schedules are used to automatically start your Actors and tasks at certain times. Until now the only way to set up a schedule was manually using the Apify app. To help our users keep up with the growing number of Actors they have hosted on the Apify platform, we have finally released a schedules API, giving you programmatic access to your schedules and their logs. For more info, see the documentation.
By the way, you can now also manage your schedules using the BETA version of Apify Client for Javascript.
Chrome DevTools in Web Scraper
The Web Scraper (apify/web-scraper) Actor development experience has become much smoother with the addition of a state-of-the-art remote inspector, Chrome DevTools. In the Web Scraper input, set the Run type to DEVELOPMENT and enjoy a full DevTools experience either in the live view tab or in a separate window by visiting the container URL. See advanced configuration for breakpoint management and go kill them bugs.
Apify SDK — New and updated examples
One of the parts of SDK documentation that was lacking was the low number of ready-to-use examples that you could just copy and paste into your project. Not anymore. We’ve redesigned the existing examples and added a bunch of new ones, addressing the most frequently asked questions on our support channels. Check them out in our examples section.
Become a partner
We’ve recently launched a referral program. Send a customer our way and earn a recurring commission as our affiliate. Interested in becoming a referral partner? Get in touch at partners@apify.com.
New public Actors
Google Shopping Scraper (emastra/google-shopping-scraper)
Extract data from Google Shopping in any country domain. Scrape the first result page and details about each product and its sellers.
Sitemap Sniffer (vaclavrut/sitemap-sniffer)
Check the most used variants of sitemaps and use it for web scraping. Save yourself some time as you won’t have to check manually anymore.
Dataset Toolbox (cyberfly/dataset-toolbox)
Perform common actions on datasets such as merge, unify, validate, transform, order fields, and more.
Updated public Actors
Yellow Pages Scraper (petr_cermak/yellow-pages-scraper)
Try out the new version with improved documentation, input schema, and functionality. Scrape addresses, phone numbers, categories, and names from Yellow Page listings.
That’s all for now! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.
