An Actor is a ready-made scraper or data API that runs in the Apify cloud. You give it a JSON input, it returns rows of data. We've built 150+ of them, for public data like store prices, app reviews, job boards, research papers and domain records. See them on Apify.

A quick example

Say you have a list of domains and want registrar, expiry date and DNS records for each. Our Domain WHOIS (RDAP) & DNS Lookup Actor does that for up to 5,000 domains per run, using the official registry RDAP servers and public DNS-over-HTTPS.

# pip install apify-client
import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor("cliqtomedia/domain-whois-dns-lookup").call(
    run_input={"domains": ["apify.com", "example.org"], "includeRdap": True, "includeDns": True}
)
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(row["domain"], row["registrar"], row["expiresAt"], row["dns"].get("MX"))

Each row looks like this (shortened):

{
  "domain": "apify.com",
  "registered": true,
  "registrar": "Amazon Registrar, Inc.",
  "expiresAt": "2035-06-02T17:14:10.000Z",
  "daysUntilExpiry": 3154,
  "nameservers": ["ns-449.awsdns-56.com", "..."],
  "dnssec": true,
  "dns": { "MX": ["1 aspmx.l.google.com", "..."] }
}

No Python? One HTTP request does the same: start the run, wait for it, and get the rows back.

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cliqtomedia~domain-whois-dns-lookup/run-sync-get-dataset-items
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN
Content-Type: application/json

{ "domains": ["apify.com", "example.org"] }

Keep your token in an environment variable, not in your code.

What's next

We'll post short how-tos here: one Actor, one real task, working code. Follow the blog if that sounds useful.

More about us: cliqtomedia.com. Some links in this post are partner links (disclosure).