Substack Scraper

Scrape Substack newsletters using an Apify Actor via the REST API.

Actor ID

BULaGFURBV7WG3K81

Prerequisites

• APIFY_TOKEN environment variable must be set
• curl and jq must be available

Workflow

Step 1: Confirm parameters with user

Ask what they want to scrape. Supported input fields:

• urls (array of strings) - Substack publication URLs to scrape
• maxArticles (integer) - max articles per publication
• includeContent (boolean) - include full article text

Step 2: Run the Actor

RESULT=$(curl -s -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/BULaGFURBV7WG3K81/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.substack.com"], "maxArticles": 20}')
echo "$RESULT" | jq '.'

Step 3: Poll and fetch (if async)

RUN_ID=$(curl -s -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/BULaGFURBV7WG3K81/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.substack.com"], "maxArticles": 100}' | jq -r '.data.id')
curl -s "https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-runs/$RUN_ID?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" | jq -r '.data.status'
curl -s "https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-runs/$RUN_ID/dataset/items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" | jq '.'

Step 4: Present results

Summarize articles: titles, authors, dates, engagement. Offer JSON/CSV export.

Error Handling

• If APIFY_TOKEN not set: export APIFY_TOKEN=your_token
• If run FAILS: check log endpoint