feat: Add `actors search` command to search Apify Store from CLI

[patrikbraborec]

Problem

Currently, the Apify CLI has no command for searching Actors in the Apify Store. This is a significant gap. Discoverability of Actors directly from the terminal is one of the most important touch points for AI agent integrations and developer workflows.

As raised by @jancurn, there is also no mention of this functionality in the documentation, which compounds the problem.

Proposed Solution

Add a new CLI command, e.g.:

apify actors search <query>

This can leverage the existing public API endpoint:

GET https://api.apify.com/v2/store

Supported query parameters (API)

Parameter	Type	Description
search	string	Search by title, name, description, username, readme
sortBy	string	relevance (default), popularity, newest, lastUpdate
category	string	Filter by category, e.g. AI
username	string	Filter by Actor author
pricingModel	string	FREE, FLAT_PRICE_PER_MONTH, PRICE_PER_DATASET_ITEM, PAY_PER_EVENT
allowsAgenticUsers (use --agentic-use in CLI)	boolean	Filter Actors that support agentic use
limit	number	Max results to return (default and max: 1000)
offset	number	Pagination offset

Example usage:

apify actors search "web scraper"
apify actors search "tiktok" --limit 5 --sort-by popularity
apify actors search "ai" --category AI --pricing-model FREE
apify actors search "ai" --agentic-use

Additional Tasks

• Implement the actors search command using the public Store API
• Update the CLI docs to reflect the new command
• Make sure the `--help` command has this info
• Consider adding a dedicated section to the Apify Academy or a blog post highlighting CLI-based Actor discovery for AI agent use cases

References

• Public Store API docs: https://api.apify.com/v2/store

[jancurn]

Just a nit: allowsAgenticUsers doesn't sound great, how about --agentic-use ? I assume this is just to skip rentals, which will be gone soon anyway...

[patrikbraborec]

Agree, --agentic-use is cleaner. I updated the issue description.

Just FYI, I checked the implementation details: Actor qualifies when it uses Pay-Per-Event pricing with platform usage covered by the developer, has limited permissions, and has Standby disabled (according to implementation: Agentic payments are not supported for standby Actors). So yes, it filters out rental-based Actors (and a bit more on the permissions/Standby side), but the core use case is skipping rentals for agentic billing compatibility.

[jancurn]

Oh, so the flag actually means --allow-agentic-payments, right? allowsAgenticUsers is not a great name... cc @mhamas @stepskop

[stepskop]

Our conflict with allows agentic payments sounds like the actual Actor accepts some kind of payments. The flag filters Actors that can be started by agents/users (agentic users 🤷 ) that may have paid through some agentic payment protocol.

I understand that allowsAgenticUsers is a bit breakneck, but agentic use sounds very general. Anyway, not a strong opinion from me here...

If we decide to call it differently, do we want to rename it (probably just add a new parameter) on API?

[jancurn]

Fair enough. For consistency, let's call it in CLI the same way for now. Hopefully all Actors will allow this soon and we'll be able to drop this flag completely

[patrikbraborec]

Thanks for the comments. So let's go with --allows-agentic-users for now?