---
id: introduction
title: Overview
sidebar_label: Overview
description: 'The official library for creating Apify Actors in Python, providing tools for web scraping, automation, and data storage integration.'
---

The Apify SDK for Python is the official library for creating [Apify Actors](https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors) in Python.

It provides tools and classes for web scraping and automation, allowing you to manage Actor lifecycles, handle data storage, work with proxies, and integrate with popular Python libraries.

## Example

Here's a simple example of an Actor that scrapes a web page and stores the result:

```py
from apify import Actor
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

async def main():
    async with Actor:
        input = await Actor.get_input()
        response = requests.get(input['url'])
        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
        await Actor.push_data({ 'url': input['url'], 'title': soup.title.string })
```

## Features

The Apify SDK for Python provides:

- **Actor lifecycle management** - Handle initialization, teardown, and graceful shutdowns
- **Storage management** - Work with Datasets, Key-Value Stores, and Request Queues
- **Event handling** - Respond to Actor events like migration, abort, and system info
- **Proxy management** - Rotate and manage proxies for web scraping
- **Platform integration** - Interact with other Actors, webhooks, and the Apify API
- **Framework compatibility** - Integrate with BeautifulSoup, Playwright, Selenium, Scrapy, and Crawlee

## Next steps

- **[Installation](./installation)** - Install the SDK and set up your development environment
- **[Quick start](./quick-start)** - Create and run your first Actor
- **[Concepts](../concepts/actor-lifecycle)** - Learn about core SDK concepts
- **[Guides](../guides/beautiful-soup)** - See how to integrate with popular libraries
