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Quickstart: run your first actor in the Console

In about five minutes you will create an account, run a ready-made scraper from the Store, and download its results. No code is needed.

1. Create an account​

  1. Open lantfly.com/signup.
  2. Enter your name, email and a password of at least 8 characters, then click Create account. You can also sign up with Google or GitHub.
  3. You start on the Free plan. No card is needed.
note

If the sign-up page says sign-up is by invitation, ask the admin of your team to invite you, or contact us.

2. Verify your email​

Lantfly sends you a verification link. Click it before you start your first run: runs are refused until the email of the account owner is verified (the API answers 403 with the code email_not_verified).

If the email did not arrive, use Send the link again in the banner at the top of the Console, then click I have verified it. Accounts that sign up with Google or GitHub are verified already.

3. Pick an actor from the Store​

  1. In the left menu, under Actors, click Store.
  2. Search or filter by category, and sort by Best quality, Most runs, Highest rated or Newest.
  3. Open an actor. For a first try, Web Scraper (lantfly~web-scraper) is a good choice: it crawls pages and extracts fields with CSS selectors.

The actor page has these tabs: Input, Information (the README), Runs, Reviews (public actors), Monitoring, Versions & builds and API. The Pricing card on the Input tab shows what the actor costs on your plan.

4. Fill in the input and start​

  1. On the Input tab, the form is generated from the actor's input schema. The example input is filled in; click Reset to the example any time to go back to it.
  2. Under Run options, you can change Memory (MB) and Timeout (seconds), and set Max items or Max cost per run (USD) to cap what a paid actor can charge. Leave them empty for no limit.
  3. Click Start.

If Start is disabled, a required field is empty or a JSON field is not valid; the form says which one.

5. Watch the run​

You land on the run page. The status moves from Ready to Running to Succeeded (or Failed, Timed out, Aborted). While it runs:

  • Log shows the actor's output live. Download the full log saves all of it.
  • Live view appears for actors that serve a web page while they run.
  • Abort stops the run. Results pushed until then are kept.

6. See the results​

When the run has finished:

  • Output shows the dataset items as a table (or the actor's own dataset views). Use Search this page to filter what is shown and pick the fields to display.
  • Key-value store shows records such as INPUT and OUTPUT, files and screenshots.
  • Storage lists the IDs of the run's dataset, key-value store and request queue.
  • Usage shows what the run cost: compute units, results and any charged events.

7. Export​

On the Output tab, click Export and pick a format: JSON, CSV, JSON Lines, Excel (XLSX) or HTML. Excel and HTML exports are limited to 20,000 items; use CSV or JSON for larger datasets. The API offers XML and RSS too (see Datasets).

You can also send results somewhere else from the same place: Send to Google Sheets… or Send to a webhook….

Next steps​

  • Run it again later: save the input as a task with Save as task, then add a schedule.
  • Get a call when runs finish: webhooks.
  • Do the same from code: API quickstart.
  • Follow a brand on social networks instead: Listening.