_template

SkillAI & models

This is the starter template from Apify's awesome-skills collection, a community library of skills for AI coding assistants. Adding it gives your AI a ready-made starting point for a new skill, so you can shape it into your own ability instead of building from scratch.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

After adding it, review the template and adjust it to match what you want your AI to do. More examples are available in the collection at github.com/apify/awesome-skills.

Then ask your AI: use the _template skill

What your AI can do with it

  • Start a new skill from a ready-made structure
  • See how a skill in the awesome-skills collection is put together
  • Adapt the template into a custom skill for your AI

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by apify/awesome-skills in skills/_template/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

REPLACE: One-line summary of what this skill helps the agent accomplish.

Example prompts

Prompts this skill handles:

  • "REPLACE: a real prompt a user would type"
  • "REPLACE: a second one, phrased differently"

Out of scope (the boundary):

  • "REPLACE: a nearby request this skill deliberately does not handle — and where to send it instead"

Prerequisites

Workflow

  1. REPLACE: Understand the user's goal, pick the right Actor(s).
  2. REPLACE: Fetch the Actor's input schema, build a valid input.
  3. REPLACE: Run the Actor, confirm with user if estimated cost is significant.
  4. REPLACE: Deliver results (count, format, link to dataset/console).

For a worked 4-step workflow, see apify/agent-skills ultimate-scraper.

Actor routing

User needActor IDTierBest for
REPLACEapify/REPLACE-actorapifyREPLACE
REPLACEcommunity/REPLACE-actorcommunityREPLACE

Tier = apify (Apify-maintained, prefer) or community (third-party).

Calling Actors — choose your interface

Skills in this repo can call Actors via any of these interfaces. Pick the one that fits your runtime; cross-tool compatibility is your responsibility.

Option A: Apify CLI (recommended for portability)

Works in any shell-capable agent. Three flags on every call:

apify actors call "ACTOR_ID" -i 'JSON_INPUT' \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/REPLACE-skill-name \
  2>/dev/null
FlagWhy
--jsonStable machine-readable output
--user-agentApify telemetry attribution
2>/dev/nullSuppress progress messages that break JSON

Other useful commands:

# Search Actors
apify actors search "KEYWORDS" --json --limit 10 \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/REPLACE-skill-name 2>/dev/null

# Fetch Actor schema
apify actors info "ACTOR_ID" --input --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/REPLACE-skill-name 2>/dev/null

# Fetch results
apify datasets get-items DATASET_ID --format json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/REPLACE-skill-name 2>/dev/null

For the canonical command set with all flags, see apify/agent-skills ultimate-scraper.

Option B: Apify MCP connector

Hosted MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com. Documented at https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp.

Option C: MCP client of your choice (e.g. mcpc)

Standalone CLI client. See https://github.com/apify/mcpc.

Troubleshooting

  • REPLACE: common error 1 → fix
  • REPLACE: common error 2 → fix
  • For detailed cost guardrails and recovery, see references/gotchas.md.

Signals

GitHub stars
252
Forks
65
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
template-apify
Source
github.com/apify/awesome-skills