Mobile.bg Bulgaria Scraper for JavaScript and Node.js: car ads as JSON for your backend

Use this repo to call the Mobile.bg Bulgaria Car Scraper from Node.js through the official apify-client package, in a single ES module. You pass a mobile.bg results address, or skip it, and get back plain objects for Bulgarian car ads: a euro price and a lev price as integers, kilometres, year, power, fuel, gearbox and HTTPS photo links ready for an <img> tag. The scraping happens on Apify, so your API route, queue consumer or scheduled function only starts a run and reads the rows when it finishes. Store them, diff them, or post them somewhere useful; the devil is in the dataset, not in your request handler.

Actor: Mobile.bg Bulgaria Car Scraper · Publisher: Devil Scrapes · Also in Python: mobile-bg-bulgaria-scraper-python

🔥 What you get

• Aim it with a link, or don't: paste a results page you already narrowed on mobile.bg into searchUrl, or leave it out and the Actor reads the general cars-and-SUVs feed.
• Two currencies, both integers: price holds euros and price_bgn holds the lev figure when the ad shows one, so arithmetic starts immediately.
• The spec sheet in columns: year, mileage_km, engine_power_hp, engine_size_cc, fuel, gearbox, body style, colour and the first-registration month each get their own field.
• Cyrillic that reads correctly: the site serves the windows-1251 encoding, and the Actor decodes it properly, so Дизелов arrives as Дизелов and not as mojibake.
• Optional detail visit: with enrichDetails on, each ad page is opened as well to add the town, a private-or-dealer flag and the seller's own text, and to fill spec gaps the result card left.
• One row per ad: an ad that shows up on two result pages is written once, keyed by listing_id.
• Refusals are its problem: when the site rejects a request or answers with a server error, the Actor waits, opens a new connection and tries again, up to five times per page.

🎯 Use cases

Feed a car-search front end from your own API

Run the Actor from a worker, upsert rows by listing_id into Postgres or MongoDB and serve them from your endpoint. Your UI filters by price, year or fuel without ever sending traffic to mobile.bg.

Post new ads and price cuts to a webhook

After each scheduled run, compare the fresh listing_id set with the stored one and send new cars, or cars whose euro price fell, to Slack, Discord or any HTTP endpoint. A dealer or buyer watching one model sees changes within the schedule interval.

Show photo cards in a dealer tool

photo_urls arrives as absolute HTTPS links taken from the result card, so a React or Vue component can render a small gallery next to the spec line without rewriting URLs.

Normalise Bulgarian labels at the edge

Fuel, gearbox and body type come in Bulgarian. A tiny lookup object in your service turns Автоматична into automatic once, and every client downstream gets English values.

⚡ Quick start

You need an Apify account and an API token from Console → Settings → Integrations. Apify's free plan includes monthly usage credit; this Actor's event prices are listed under Pricing below.

git clone https://github.com/devilscrapes/mobile-bg-bulgaria-scraper-javascript.git
cd mobile-bg-bulgaria-scraper-javascript
npm install
export APIFY_TOKEN=your_token_here
node index.js                       # uses input.json
node index.js my-input.json --out data --max-charge 2

The script starts the Mobile.bg Bulgaria Car Scraper, waits for it to finish, prints a link to the run in Apify Console and saves every result to results.json and results.csv. It exits with code 1 and the run's status message if the run fails.

🧩 The core call

If you only want the integration, these lines are all of it. The awaited call() returns once the Actor has stopped, and listItems() resolves to that run's rows as an array.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('DevilScrapes/mobile-bg-bulgaria-cars').call({"maxResults": 10, "enrichDetails": true, "proxyConfiguration": {"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

📥 Input

index.js loads input.json and passes it along verbatim. This one leaves searchUrl out, so the default feed is read; it stops at 10 cars and keeps the per-ad detail visit, which costs about 22 cents in total. Do not drop the RESIDENTIAL group from proxyConfiguration, since the Actor will refuse to start without it. In production, build searchUrl from a filtered mobile.bg address in your handler and lift maxResults as far as 1,000.

{
  "maxResults": 10,
  "enrichDetails": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}

Field	Type	Required	Default	Allowed values
searchUrl	string	no	—	—
maxResults	integer	no	50	—
enrichDetails	boolean	no	true	—
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}	—

📤 Output

One object per ad. Your code can rely on listing_id, listing_url, title and scraped_at; type every other property as nullable. price and price_bgn are integers, never formatted strings. location, seller_type and the full description need enrichDetails; region and seller_name are present but empty in the current version.

Field	Type	Always present
listing_id	string	yes
listing_url	string	yes
title	string	yes
make	string or null	no
model	string or null	no
year	integer or null	no
price	integer or null	no
currency	string or null	no
price_bgn	integer or null	no
mileage_km	integer or null	no
fuel_type	string or null	no
transmission	string or null	no
engine_power_hp	integer or null	no
engine_size_cc	integer or null	no
body_type	string or null	no
color	string or null	no
first_registration	string or null	no
location	string or null	no
region	string or null	no
seller_type	string or null	no
seller_name	string or null	no
photo_urls	array	no
description	string or null	no
posted_date	string or null	no
scraped_at	string	yes

💰 Pricing

Event	Price (USD)
Actor start	$0.2
result-row	$0.002

Prices as configured on 2026-10-16. The Actor page always shows the current price. Runs are billed to the Apify account that owns the token. Use --max-charge to cap what a single run can cost.

🛠️ Working with the data in JavaScript

This script keeps a previous.json between runs and reports ads that are new or got cheaper, then writes them to changes.json for a webhook sender to pick up. It needs nothing beyond Node.js built-ins.

import { readFile, writeFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { existsSync } from 'node:fs';

const current = JSON.parse(await readFile('results.json', 'utf8'));
const previous = existsSync('previous.json') ? JSON.parse(await readFile('previous.json', 'utf8')) : [];
const before = new Map(previous.map((car) => [car.listing_id, car]));

const changes = [];
for (const car of current) {
    const old = before.get(car.listing_id);
    if (!old) {
        changes.push({ kind: 'new', title: car.title, eur: car.price, km: car.mileage_km, url: car.listing_url });
    } else if (car.price !== null && old.price !== null && car.price < old.price) {
        const drop = old.price - car.price;
        changes.push({ kind: 'cheaper', title: car.title, eur: car.price, drop, url: car.listing_url });
    }
}

console.table(changes);
await writeFile('changes.json', JSON.stringify(changes, null, 2));
await writeFile('previous.json', JSON.stringify(current));

❓ FAQ

Can I run this from AWS Lambda or a Vercel function?

Yes, if the platform lets an invocation wait for the Actor. A detail-enriched run adds one page visit per car, so with short timeouts start the run with .start(), return at once and read the dataset later from an Apify webhook.

What happens if mobile.bg stops answering halfway through?

If the first page cannot be loaded after retries, the run fails so your job notices. If a later page fails, the run ends successfully with the cars it already has, so check the row count before you treat a short run as the whole market.

Does it return the seller's phone number?

No. Phone numbers sit behind the site's contact widget and are not collected. You get the ad link, so a person can make contact through mobile.bg itself.

How do I keep test runs cheap?

Set enrichDetails to false when you only need card fields, keep maxResults low, and pass node index.js --max-charge 0.5. Apify then stops charging the run at fifty cents.

🧯 Troubleshooting

• Set APIFY_TOKEN first: export the token in the same shell, or put it in a local .env file your shell loads. Never commit it.
• Run finished with FAILED or ABORTED: open the printed Console link; the run log says why. Input validation errors name the field.
• Fewer rows than expected: a --max-charge cap also limits how many results can be charged. Raise the cap or lower the limits in your input.
• Something looks wrong in the data: open an issue on the Actor page so the maintainers see it.

🔗 More from Devil Scrapes

• Mobile.bg Bulgaria Car Scraper on Apify Store
• Python version of this example
• All Devil Scrapes Actors
• Apify web scraping cookbook

Related Actors:

• AutoScout24 Germany Car Scraper — German used-car ads, handy as a Western price benchmark.
• Njuškalo Car Scraper (Croatia) — car classifieds from Croatia, another Balkan market.
• Blocket Car Scraper (Sweden) — Swedish car ads with SEK prices for a Nordic comparison.

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MIT licensed example code. The Actor itself runs on Apify and is maintained by Devil Scrapes. Not affiliated with Mobile.bg.