Share Your Apify Actors as Branded Web Apps (Without Leaking Your API Token!)

Have you ever built an incredible Apify Actor to crawl websites, scrape leads, or generate datasets, only to hit a wall when it's time to share it with clients, teammates, or non-technical users? Usually, the options aren't great: you either have to teach them how to navigate the technical Apify Console (and risk them accidentally modifying something), build and host a custom frontend from scratch (which takes hours or days), or worse-manually run the Actor and email them the CSVs. But what if you could turn your Actor into a clean, customized, and branded web app in under five minutes, completely hiding the underlying Apify complexity and keeping your API token safe? Enter ActorWebApp (solutionssmart/actorwebapp), a clever tool maintained by the community that does exactly this. 📺 Watch the Walkthrough! Before we dive into the details, I put together an educational, step-by-step video showing exactly how to set up and run the ActorWebApp in real-time. Check it out below! 🎥 In this tutorial, you will see how we take a standard scraper and transform it into a fully styled client-facing portal in just a few clicks!

Why ActorWebApp is a Game-Changer

Instead of spending your weekend writing boilerplate frontend code, routing API endpoints, and configuring webhooks, ActorWebApp acts as an instant UI proxy. It reads your target Actor's default-build input schema and automatically generates a matching web form. Here is what makes it so powerful:

• Instant Web Form Generation: It parses standard input fields, arrays, selectors, request lists, help texts, and numeric limits directly from the target Actor's schema.
• No More Token Exposure: Your APIFY_TOKEN is kept securely on the server-side and is never sent to the end user's browser.
• Built-in Brand Styling: You can easily customize the app with a light, dark, or warm theme, set an accent color, and upload your custom logo to show in the header.
• Live Run Progress & Output Downloads: Users can fill out the form, click run, watch the status in real-time, preview the dataset rows, and download their data directly as JSON or CSV.
• Simplifies the UI: You can toggle off technical platform parameters (like proxy settings, memory, and runtime options) so your clients only see the fields they actually need.

Common Use Cases

• Client Data Portals: Turn a website scraper or lead generation tool into a branded data-collection interface for non-technical clients.
• Team Operations: Let marketing or sales teams trigger internal data-gathering workflows without them needing access to your Apify platform credentials.
• Result Delivery: Provide an instant results page showing live table previews and quick downloads without hosting a database.

How to Set It Up (Step-by-Step)

Getting your web app live takes just four simple steps:

1. Deploy & Enable Standby Mode Deploy the Actor Web App (solutionssmart/actorwebapp) to your Apify account and enable Standby mode. Standby mode is what keeps the application active and ready to respond to requests.
2. Configure the Target Actor Specify the Actor you want to create a frontend for by setting the actorId in the username/actor-name format. The target Actor must be accessible to the account running your Web App.
3. Customize Your Branding & Displays Using the Apify Console's configuration controls (or directly editing the JSON), configure your branding, input display, and output display groups. Here is a complete JSON configuration example to give you an idea of what is possible:

{
  "actorId": "solutionssmart/brand-dna",
  "title": "Brand DNA Portal",
  "description": "Extract a structured brand profile from any website.",
  "branding": {
    "logoUrl": "https://yourdomain.com/assets/logo.png",
    "accentColor": "#19724c",
    "theme": "dark",
    "hideApifyTechnicalFields": true
  },
  "input": {
    "showAdvancedFields": false
  },
  "output": {
    "showTable": true,
    "allowCsv": true