DEV.to Scraper — Articles by Tag & Author

What this Actor scrapes

DEV.to is the internet's largest developer blogging platform: hundreds of thousands of articles, millions of reactions, and a v1 API that pages in batches of 30. This Actor wraps that API with bulk fan-out — scrape by tag (python, webdev, ai), by author username, or from the global latest or top feed — and delivers one clean, Pydantic-validated row per article with the full Markdown body included.

Whether you need a corpus for fine-tuning a code assistant, a daily digest of trending posts, or a competitive read on a DevRel team's publishing cadence, the DEV.to scraper handles the pagination, retry logic, and rate-limit pacing so you don't have to.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so requests look like a live browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or rate-limit response.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per request, Retry-After headers honoured automatically.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back we slow down and surface partial results rather than silently dropping them.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for results that land in your dataset. No data means no charge (beyond the small actor-start warm-up fee).

Use cases

• RAG corpus seeding — pull all articles for tag=ai or tag=python to build a retrieval-augmented assistant grounded in real developer tutorials.
• Trending tag dashboards — schedule daily runs on mode=top and diff the output to watch which posts gain traction over time.
• Author monitoring — mirror a writer's full catalogue and alert your team the moment they publish something new.
• Newsletter assembly — pull the top 10 articles from a tag each week, render them to Markdown, and pipe straight into your send queue.
• Competitor DevRel benchmarking — compare engagement (reactions, comments, reading time) across multiple author accounts to see whose content strategy is landing.
• AI training data — bulk-export articles tagged tutorial or showdev for supervised fine-tuning datasets; body Markdown preserves code blocks cleanly.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "mode": "tag",
  "tag": "python",
  "includeBody": false,
  "maxResults": 3,
  "concurrency": 4,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

idslugtitledescriptionurlcover_imagetagsauthor_usernameauthor_namereading_time_minutespositive_reactions_countcomments_countbody_markdownpublished_atedited_atscraped_at

{
  "id": 1234567,
  "slug": "fast-python-async-tricks-1abc",
  "title": "Fast Python async tricks every dev should know",
  "description": "Five patterns that cut your async boilerplate in half.",
  "url": "https://dev.to/me/fast-python-async-tricks-1abc",
  "author_username": "me",
  "author_name": "Ada Dev",
  "tags": [
    "python",
    "async",
    "webdev"
  ],
  "positive_reactions_count": 142,
  "comments_count": 8,
  "body_markdown": "## Introduction\n\nAsync Python is...",
  "published_at": "2025-11-12T09:00:00Z",
  "edited_at": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-01T07:32:11Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Body fetch cost: enabling includeBody=true fires one extra API call per article, which counts toward both run time and result cost. Disable it for metadata-only sweeps.
• API pagination cap: DEV.to's v1 API stops returning results after 1 000 articles per tag/mode. Use narrower tags or multiple sequential runs to exceed that limit.
• Images and code-block formatting: body Markdown is delivered as-is from the API. Images are URLs, not downloaded files. Code blocks are fenced Markdown, not rendered HTML.
• Cached API responses: if DEV.to's API returns a stale version of a recently edited article, that is what lands in your dataset. Re-run to refresh.