Instagram Scrape Account Stats

A tool for scraping public data from Instagram, without needing to get permission from Instagram. It scrapes the following fields:

• description
• followers
• following
• isExplicit
• isPrivate
• isVerified
• name
• posts
• userId
• username
• website

See lib/response.schema.json for further details.

Example

CLI

The CLI operates entirely over STDOUT, and will output the account stats as JSON.

$ instagram-scrape-account-stats -u slang800
{"description":null,"followers":21,"following":90,"isExplicit":false,"isPrivate":false,"isVerified":false,"name":"Sean Lang","userId":"465981344","username":"slang800","posts":2,"website":"http://slang.cx"}

JavaScript Module

The following example is in CoffeeScript.

{getAccountStats} = require 'instagram-scrape-account-stats'

getAccountStats(username: 'slang800').then((account) ->
  console.log "#{account.username} has #{account.followers} followers."
)

The following example is the same as the last one, but in JavaScript.

var getAccountStats = require('instagram-scrape-account-stats').getAccountStats;

getAccountStats({username: 'slang800'}).then(function(account) {
  console.log(account.username + " has " + account.followers + " followers.");
});

Why?

Instagram doesn't provide an open, structured, and machine readable API, so, we're forced to scrape their user-facing site.

Caveats

• This is probably against the Instagram TOS, so don't use it if that sort of thing worries you.
• Whenever Instagram updates certain parts of their front-end this scraper will need to be updated to support the new API.
• You can't scrape protected accounts (cause it's not public duh).