Actors MCP Server

Actors MCP Server Implementation of an MCP server for all Apify Actors. This server enables interaction with one or more Apify Actors that can be defined in the MCP Server configuration. The server can be used in several ways:

• 🇦 MCP Server Actor – HTTP server accessible via Server-Sent Events (SSE).
• ⾕ MCP Server Stdio – Local server available via standard input/output (stdio).
• 💬 Tester MCP Client – Chat-like UI for interacting with the MCP server.

🎯 What does Apify MCP server do?

The MCP Server Actor allows an AI assistant to use any Apify Actor as a tool to perform a specific task. For example it can:

• use Facebook Posts Scraper to extract data from Facebook posts from multiple pages/profiles
• use Google Maps Email Extractor to extract Google Maps contact details
• use Google Search Results Scraper to scrape Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
• use Instagram Scraper to scrape Instagram posts, profiles, places, photos, and comments
• use RAG Web Browser to search the web, scrape the top N URLs, and return their content

MCP Clients

To interact with the Apify MCP server, you can use MCP clients such as:

• Claude Desktop (only Stdio support)
• LibreChat (stdio and SSE support (yeah without Authorization header))
• Apify Tester MCP Client (SSE support with Authorization headers)
• other clients at [)
• more clients at [) Additionally, you can use simple example clients found in the examples directory. When you have Actors integrated with the MCP server, you can ask:
• "Search web and summarize recent trends about AI Agents"
• "Find top 10 best Italian restaurants in San Francisco"
• "Find and analyze Instagram profile of The Rock"
• "Provide a step-by-step guide on using the Model Context Protocol with source URLs."
• "What Apify Actors I can use?" The following image shows how the Apify MCP server interacts with the Apify platform and AI clients: Actors-MCP-server In the future, we plan to load Actors dynamically and provide Apify's dataset and key-value store as resources. See the Roadmap for more details.

🔄 What is the Model Context Protocol?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI applications (and AI agents), such as Claude Desktop, to connect to external tools and data sources. MCP is an open protocol that enables secure, controlled interactions between AI applications, AI Agents, and local or remote resources. For more information, see the Model Context Protocol website or blogpost What is MCP and why does it matter?.

🤖 How is MCP Server related to AI Agents?

The Apify MCP Server exposes Apify's Actors through the MCP protocol, allowing AI Agents or frameworks that implement the MCP protocol to access all Apify Actors as tools for data extraction, web searching, and other tasks. To learn more about AI Agents, explore our blog post: What are AI Agents? and browse Apify's curated AI Agent collection. Wondering if AI Agents are suitable for your specific needs? Our guide AI agent workflow: building an agent to query Apify datasets walks you through practical implementation considerations and use cases.

🧱 Components

Tools

Actors

Any Apify Actor can be used as a tool. By default, the server is pre-configured with the Actors specified below, but it can be overridden by providing Actor input.

'apify/instagram-scraper'
'apify/rag-web-browser'
'lukaskrivka/google-maps-with-contact-details'

The MCP server loads the Actor input schema and creates MCP tools corresponding to the Actors. See this example of input schema for the RAG Web Browser. The tool name must always be the full Actor name, such as apify/rag-web-browser. The arguments for an MCP tool represent the input parameters of the Actor. For example, for the apify/rag-web-browser Actor, the arguments are:

 "query": "restaurants in San Francisco",
 "maxResults": 3

You don't need to specify the input parameters or which Actor to call, everything is managed by an LLM. When a tool is called, the arguments are automatically passed to the Actor by the LLM. You can refer to the specific Actor's documentation for a list of available arguments.

Helper tools

The server provides a set of helper tools to discover available Actors and retrieve their details:

• get-actor-details: Retrieves documentation, input schema, and details about a specific Actor.
• discover-actors: Searches for relevant Actors using keywords and returns their details. There are also tools to manage the available tools list. However, dynamically adding and removing tools requires the MCP client to have the capability to update tools list (handle ToolListChangedNotificationSchema), which is typically not supported. You can try this functionality using the Apify Tester MCP Client Actor. To enable it, set the enableActorAutoLoading parameter.
• add-actor-as-tool: Adds an Actor by name to the available tools list without executing it, requiring user consent to run later.
• remove-actor-from-tool: Removes an Actor by name from the available tools list when it's no longer needed.

Prompt & Resources

The server does not provide any resources and prompts. We plan to add Apify's dataset and key-value store as resources in the future.

⚙️ Usage

The Apify MCP Server can be used in two ways: as an Apify Actor running at Apify platform or as a local server running on your machine.

🇦 MCP Server Actor

Standby web server

The Actor runs in Standby mode with an HTTP web server that receives and processes requests. Start server with default Actors. To use the Apify MCP Server with set of default Actors, send an HTTP GET request with your Apify API token to the following URL.

<APIFY_TOKEN>

It is also possible to start the MCP server with a different set of Actors. To do this, create a task and specify the list of Actors you want to use. Then, run task in Standby mode with the selected Actors using your Apify API token.

<APIFY_TOKEN>

You can find a list of all available Actors in the Apify Store.

💬 Interact with the MCP Server over SSE

Once the server is running, you can interact with Server-Sent Events (SSE) to send messages to the server and receive responses. The easiest way is to use Tester MCP Client on Apify. Other clients do not support SSE yet, but this will likely change. Please verify if MCP clients such as Superinference.ai or LibreChat support SSE with custom headers. (Claude Desktop does not support SSE transport yet, see Claude Desktop Configuration section for more details). In the client settings you need to provide server configuration:

 "mcpServers": {
 "apify": {
 "type": "sse",
 "url": "
 "env": {
 "APIFY_TOKEN": "your-apify-token"

Alternatively, you can use simple python client_see.py or test the server using curl commands.

1. Initiate Server-Sent-Events (SSE) by sending a GET request to the following URL:

curl <APIFY_TOKEN>

The server will respond with a sessionId, which you can use to send messages to the server:

event: endpoint
data: /message?sessionId=a1b

2. Send a message to the server by making a POST request with the sessionId:

curl -X POST "<APIFY_TOKEN>&session_id=a1b" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 1,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"arguments": { "searchStringsArray": ["restaurants in San Francisco"], "maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch": 3 },
"name": "lukaskrivka/google-maps-with-contact-details"

The MCP server will start the Actor lukaskrivka/google-maps-with-contact-details with the provided arguments as input parameters. For this POST request, the server will respond with:

Accepted

3. Receive the response. The server will invoke the specified Actor as a tool using the provided query parameters and stream the response back to the client via SSE. The response will be returned as JSON text.

event: message
data: {"result":{"content":[{"type":"text","text":"{\"searchString\":\"restaurants in San Francisco\",\"rank\":1,\"title\":\"Gary Danko\",\"description\":\"Renowned chef Gary Danko's fixed-price menus of American cuisine ... \",\"price\":\"$100+\"...}}]}}

⾕ MCP Server at a local host

You can run the Apify MCP Server on your local machine by configuring it with Claude Desktop or any other MCP clients. You can also use to install the server automatically.

Prerequisites

• MacOS or Windows
• The latest version of Claude Desktop must be installed (or another MCP client)
• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• Apify API Token (APIFY_TOKEN)

Install

First, clone the repository using the following command:

git clone git@github.com:apify/actor-mcp-server.git

Navigate to the project directory and install the required dependencies:

cd actor-mcp-server
npm install

Before running the server, you need to build the project:

npm run build

Claude Desktop

To configure Claude Desktop to work with the MCP server, follow these steps. For a detailed guide, refer to the Claude Desktop Users Guide.

1. Download Claude for desktop

• Available for Windows and macOS.
• For Linux users, you can build a Debian package using this unofficial build script.

2. Open the Claude Desktop app and enable Developer Mode from the top-left menu bar.
3. Once enabled, open Settings (also from the top-left menu bar) and navigate to the Developer Option, where you'll find the Edit Config button
4. Open configuration file and edit the following file:

• On macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• On Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

"mcpServers": {
"actors-mcp-server": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server"],
"env": {
"APIFY_TOKEN": "your-apify-token"

Alternatively, you can use actors argument to select one or more Apify Actors:

"mcpServers": {
"actors-mcp-server": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server",
"--actors", "lukaskrivka/google-maps-with-contact-details,apify/instagram-scraper"
"env": {
"APIFY_TOKEN": "your-apify-token"

5. Restart Claude Desktop

• Fully quit Claude Desktop (ensure it's not just minimized or closed).
• Restart Claude Desktop.
• Look for the 🔌 icon to confirm that the Exa server is connected.

6. Open the Claude Desktop chat and ask "What Apify Actors I can use?" Claude-desktop-with-Actors-MCP-server
7. Examples You can ask Claude to perform tasks, such as:

Find and analyze recent research papers about LLMs.
Find top 10 best Italian restaurants in San Francisco.
Find and analyze instagram profile of the Rock.

Debugging NPM package @apify/actors-mcp-server with modelcontextprotocol/inspector

To debug the server, use the MCP Inspector tool:

export APIFY_TOKEN=your-apify-token
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector npx -y @apify/actors-mcp-server

Installing via

To install Apify Actors MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via :

npx -y @/cli install @apify/actors-mcp-server --client claude

Stdio clients

Create environment file .env with the following content:

APIFY_TOKEN=your-apify-token
# ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is only required when you want to run examples/clientStdioChat.js
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-anthropic-api-token

In the examples directory, you can find two clients that interact with the server via standard input/output (stdio):

1. clientStdio.ts This client script starts the MCP server with two specified Actors. It then calls the apify/rag-web-browser tool with a query and prints the result. It demonstrates how to connect to the MCP server, list available tools, and call a specific tool using stdio transport.

node dist/examples/clientStdio.js

2. clientStdioChat.ts This client script also starts the MCP server but provides an interactive command-line chat interface. It prompts the user to interact with the server, allowing for dynamic tool calls and responses. This example is useful for testing and debugging interactions with the MCP server in conversational manner.

node dist/examples/clientStdioChat.js

👷🏼 Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• Python 3.9 or higher Create environment file .env with the following content:

APIFY_TOKEN=your-apify-token
# ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is only required when you want to run examples/clientStdioChat.js
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-anthropic-api-key

Local client (SSE)

To test the server with the SSE transport, you can use python script examples/clientSse.ts: Currently, the node.js client does not support to establish a connection to remote server witch custom headers. You need to change URL to your local server URL in the script.

node dist/examples/clientSse.js

Debugging

Since MCP servers operate over standard input/output (stdio), debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, use the MCP Inspector. Build the actor-mcp-server package:

npm run build

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

export APIFY_TOKEN=your-apify-token
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node ./dist/index.js

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.

ⓘ Limitations and feedback

To limit the context size the properties in the input schema are pruned and description is truncated to 500 characters. Enum fields and titles are truncated to max 50 options. Memory for each Actor is limited to 4GB. Free users have an 8GB limit, 128MB needs to be allocated for running Actors-MCP-Server. If you need other features or have any feedback, submit an issue in Apify Console to let us know.

🚀 Roadmap (March 2025)

• Add Apify's dataset and key-value store as resources.
• Add tools such as Actor logs and Actor runs for debugging.

References

• Model Context Protocol
• What are AI Agents?
• What is MCP and why does it matter?
• Tester MCP Client
• AI agent workflow: building an agent to query Apify datasets
• MCP Client development guide