No API or MCP support for publishing an Actor task (publicConfig silently ignored)

[myagizmaktav]

Summary

Publishing an Actor task is currently Console-only. There is no public API endpoint and no MCP tool for it, even though the Actor quality score actively recommends "Publish a task for your Actor" and the docs allow up to 50 tasks per Actor.

For a publisher with dozens of Actors this makes the recommended action a manual, per-task click-through in Console.

What I tried (API)

1. POST /v2/actor-tasks and PUT /v2/actor-tasks/{taskId} accept only name, title, options, input, actorStandby (per Update task).
2. The response of both endpoints contains a publicConfig field (null for an unpublished task), but sending publicConfig in a PUT body is silently ignored — no error, and the field stays null:

// PUT /v2/actor-tasks/{id}  {"publicConfig": {"slug":"...","seoTitle":"...","seoDescription":"..."}}
// -> 200 OK, but response still has:  "publicConfig": null

3. Guessed sub-resources all return page-not-found:
   • GET|PUT|POST /v2/actor-tasks/{id}/publication → 404
   • POST /v2/actor-tasks/{id}/publish → 404

What I tried (MCP)

mcp.apify.com (apify-mcp-server v0.12.0) exposes 11 tools — search-actors, fetch-actor-details, call-actor, get-actor-run, get-dataset-items, get-key-value-store-record, abort-actor-run, search-apify-docs, fetch-apify-docs, report-problem, apify--rag-web-browser. None of them can create or publish a task, so the MCP route is not an alternative either.

Requests

1. Document the publishing surface. Publish your Actor task describes only the Console flow; it would help to state explicitly that no API support exists today (so people stop reverse-engineering publicConfig).
2. Expose it in the API — either document publicConfig as writable on PUT /v2/actor-tasks/{taskId}, or add a dedicated endpoint, with the same fields the Console form has: slug, SEO title, SEO description, displayed input fields, dataset view.
3. At minimum, fail loudly. Right now an unsupported publicConfig in the request body is accepted with 200 OK and silently dropped, which looks like a successful write.

Why it matters

Published tasks are indexed by search engines and exposed as .md to AI agents, and Console's Insights recommends them as a quality-score item. Bulk publishing is exactly the kind of repetitive work an API should cover — currently the only path is N × manual Console forms.

Related: #2782, #2783.