Scrape Stack Overflow and 170+ Stack Exchange sites by tag, site and sort order. Title, tags, score, views, answers, author, reputation and dates. No API key, no proxy.
This repository is documentation for the Stack Exchange Questions Scraper Apify Actor. The Actor runs on the Apify platform — this repo shows you how to call it, what input it takes and what data it returns.
The Stack Exchange Questions Scraper pulls developer and community questions from Stack Overflow and any of the 170+ Stack Exchange Q&A network sites — programming, DevOps, data science, sysadmin, security, math, gaming, and dozens more — filtered by tag, site and sort order. Each question comes back as a flat 14-column row with title, tags, score, view count, answer count, accepted-answer flag, author name, author reputation and creation / last-activity timestamps, ready to drop into a spreadsheet, warehouse or RAG pipeline.
It is the practical Stack Overflow API alternative for developer-insight research, SEO content mining, support triage and LLM training data. There is no API key, no login and no proxy required — you only need an Apify account. Pull thousands of questions per run and export to JSON, CSV or Excel.
Each question becomes one flat row with these 14 fields:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
questionId |
Stack Exchange question identifier |
title |
Question title |
link |
Direct URL to the question |
tags |
Array of tags applied to the question (e.g. python, react, kubernetes) |
author |
Display name of the asker |
authorReputation |
Reputation score of the asker |
score |
Net upvote score of the question |
viewCount |
Total number of views |
answerCount |
Number of answers |
isAnswered |
Whether the question has an answer considered answered |
hasAcceptedAnswer |
Whether an answer was accepted |
createdAt |
ISO timestamp the question was asked |
lastActivityAt |
ISO timestamp of the last activity |
scrapedAt |
ISO timestamp when the row was scraped |
- Developer-insight & pain-point research — mine what users actually struggle with for a language, framework or product by pulling its tagged questions.
- Product & competitor monitoring — track questions tagged with your tool or a competitor's on a schedule and diff against yesterday.
- FAQ & SEO content generation — surface high-view, high-score questions to turn into docs, tutorials and articles.
- Support intelligence — quantify recurring issues by tag, score and view count to prioritize your knowledge base.
- LLM / NLP training data — assemble large, structured developer Q&A corpora for fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation.
- Unanswered-question hunting — filter on
isAnswered/hasAcceptedAnswerto find high-view gaps worth answering or documenting. - Community & DevRel analytics — measure question volume and engagement for a technology over time across multiple network sites.
- Open the Actor: Stack Exchange Questions Scraper on Apify.
- Click Try for free — with empty input it returns recent Stack Overflow questions so you can see the output shape.
- Pick a Site, add a Tag, choose a Sort order, click Start, then export from the Output tab.
npm install -g apify-cli
apify login
apify call logiover/stack-exchange-questions-scraper --input '{
"site": "stackoverflow",
"tagged": "python",
"sort": "votes",
"maxQuestions": 500
}'curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/logiover~stack-exchange-questions-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"site": "devops",
"tagged": "kubernetes;helm",
"sort": "creation",
"maxQuestions": 300
}'See examples/javascript.md and examples/python.md. Short version:
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('logiover/stack-exchange-questions-scraper').call({
site: 'stackoverflow', tagged: 'react', sort: 'votes', maxQuestions: 300,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);Everything is optional — run it as-is to pull the latest Stack Overflow questions, or narrow with a site, tag and sort.
| Field | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
site |
string (dropdown) | Stack Exchange site short ID: stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, askubuntu, dba, datascience, codereview, security, math and 170+ more. |
stackoverflow |
tagged |
string | Tag filter (e.g. python). Combine multiple tags with ; to require all of them. Empty = all questions for the site. |
"" |
sort |
string (dropdown) | activity (most recent activity), creation (newest), votes (highest score) or hot (trending). |
activity |
maxQuestions |
integer | Maximum number of questions to save. 0 = paginate until the tag is exhausted (subject to the public API's daily quota). |
100 |
Finding a site short ID: it is the subdomain of the site —
stackoverflowfor stackoverflow.com,serverfaultfor serverfault.com,datasciencefor datascience.stackexchange.com, and so on. The Actor's Site dropdown lists 80+ ready-to-pick sites.
One row per question — a flat 14-column record. Realistic sample:
{
"questionId": 78123456,
"title": "How do I merge two dictionaries in Python 3?",
"link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78123456/how-do-i-merge-two-dictionaries-in-python-3",
"tags": ["python", "python-3.x", "dictionary"],
"author": "dev_ada",
"authorReputation": 4820,
"score": 137,
"viewCount": 89412,
"answerCount": 9,
"isAnswered": true,
"hasAcceptedAnswer": true,
"createdAt": "2026-06-28T10:14:00Z",
"lastActivityAt": "2026-07-05T22:03:00Z",
"scrapedAt": "2026-07-12T12:00:00Z"
}The dataset ships with a pre-configured Overview table view (title, tags, score, views, answers, answered, author, created).
- Schedules — keep a fresh Q&A feed for a tag or product on a daily or weekly cadence.
- Webhooks — trigger downstream processing the moment a run finishes.
- Google Sheets / S3 / databases — push questions into a warehouse, spreadsheet or BI tool.
- Zapier / Make / n8n / Pipedream — alert when a new high-view question appears for a monitored tag.
Configure these on the Actor page and via the Apify API.
Every run stores results in an Apify Dataset, downloadable as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel (XLSX), HTML table or XML, or fetched via the Apify API.
No. The Actor uses anonymous public access — no account, key or proxy required. Anonymous usage is subject to a daily quota, which the Actor respects with automatic backoff.
Yes. If you want to scrape Stack Overflow without registering, this Actor is a practical Stack Overflow API alternative — it returns flat rows ready for analysis, no key required.
Any of the 170+ Stack Exchange network sites — Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, DBA, Data Science, Code Review, Cross Validated, Software Engineering, DevOps, Information Security, Mathematics and more. Just enter the site's short ID.
Yes. Enter several tags separated by ; in the tagged field to narrow results to questions carrying all of them.
Set tagged (for example python), choose sort=votes, and the scraper returns questions ordered by net upvotes with score, views and answer counts.
Scrape a tag, then filter the dataset on isAnswered or hasAcceptedAnswer — high-view questions without an accepted answer are strong FAQ and content targets.
Yes. Enter any Stack Exchange short ID in the site field, such as serverfault, superuser or datascience, to scrape that network site by tag.
Thousands. Set maxQuestions to a cap for a sample, or to 0 to paginate until the tag is exhausted (subject to the public API's daily quota).
No. Runs work out of the box with no proxy configuration.
Run the Actor for your chosen site and tag, then download the dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel or XML from the Apify Console, or pull it via the Apify API.
Pair Stack Exchange with the rest of the developer & community intelligence suite:
- 💬 Reddit Subreddit Scraper · Reddit Search Scraper
- 🟠 Hacker News Search Scraper · HN Who Is Hiring
- 🐙 GitHub Repository Scraper · 👩💻 Dev.to Articles Scraper
- Browse the full logiover Actor catalog on Apify Store »
📄 Documentation only — this repository contains no source code. The Actor runs on the Apify platform.
Licensed under the MIT License · © 2026 logiover