If you haven't heard of it, Apify is a marketplace where devs can create actors and monetize their usage. I've been using a twitter scraper actor for one of my side hustles, and I got curious if there was anything Bitcoin and Nostr related on their actor marketplace. I did find some Bitcoin price actors on there, but nothing for Nostr. So I made one!

My nostr actor uses nak under the hood to query nostr relays and fetch whatever npub, nprofile, note, or nip05 addresses the user is interested in. They can pass in just one, or a list, and my actor will run nak fetch on each of them, handling errors and eventually outputting JSON results.

Apify actors are often coded in either JS or Python so I went with Python. I usually write in JS but lately I've wanted to try something else. I learned a lot about Python along the way. I really wanted to be sure that the actor is as good as it can be, so I spent a day learning how to use pytest. I wrote some integration tests that run on GitHub workflows every 24 hours. If the actor fails to return results or throws an unrecoverable error, I get an e-mail letting me know I need to fix the actor.

Coming from 10+ years of JS, I'm really liking Python. I like venv and pip. It seems really simple when I compare it to getting started with a TypeScript project. I presume that feeling is just because I'm new though. I could imagine the Python ecosystem being just as fragmented as JS/TS.

Anyway, that's my project for this week. Honestly I'd be surprised if anyone uses it, because any dev could just use nak directly without using my Apify Actor. But maybe, just maybe, there's a market for this. Maybe there's someone out there using n8n or Zapier or IFTTT who want to query Nostr without having to write code. I think this Apify actor might work for them. Or maybe there's someone who has unused credits on Apify and they want to play around.

It's an experiment really. I'd love to know what you think.