npm package discovery and stats viewer.

Discover Tips

  • General search

    [free text search, go nuts!]

  • Package details

    pkg:[package-name]

  • User packages

    @[username]

Sponsor

Optimize Toolset

I’ve always been into building performant and accessible sites, but lately I’ve been taking it extremely seriously. So much so that I’ve been building a tool to help me optimize and monitor the sites that I build to make sure that I’m making an attempt to offer the best experience to those who visit them. If you’re into performant, accessible and SEO friendly sites, you might like it too! You can check it out at Optimize Toolset.

About

Hi, 👋, I’m Ryan Hefner  and I built this site for me, and you! The goal of this site was to provide an easy way for me to check the stats on my npm packages, both for prioritizing issues and updates, and to give me a little kick in the pants to keep up on stuff.

As I was building it, I realized that I was actually using the tool to build the tool, and figured I might as well put this out there and hopefully others will find it to be a fast and useful way to search and browse npm packages as I have.

If you’re interested in other things I’m working on, follow me on Twitter or check out the open source projects I’ve been publishing on GitHub.

I am also working on a Twitter bot for this site to tweet the most popular, newest, random packages from npm. Please follow that account now and it will start sending out packages soon–ish.

Open Software & Tools

This site wouldn’t be possible without the immense generosity and tireless efforts from the people who make contributions to the world and share their work via open source initiatives. Thank you 🙏

© 2024 – Pkg Stats / Ryan Hefner

instagram-scraper2

v2.0.0

Published

scrape public instagram data w/out API access

Downloads

3

Readme

Instagram Screen Scrape

Build Status NPM version NPM license

A tool for scraping public data from Instagram, without needing to get permission from Instagram. It can (theoretically) scrape anything that a non-logged-in user can see. But, right now it only supports getting posts for a given username or comments for a given post.

Example

CLI

The CLI operates entirely over STDOUT, and will output posts as it scrapes them. The following example is truncated because the output of the real command is obviously very long... it will end with a closing bracket (making it valid JSON) if you see the full output.

$ instagram-screen-scrape posts --username carrotcreative
[{"id":"0toxcII4Eo","username":"carrotcreative","time":1427420497,"type":"image","likes":82,"comments":3,"text":"Our CTO, @kylemac, speaking on the #LetsTalkCulture panel tonight @paperlesspost.","media":"https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xaf1/t51.2885-15/e15/11055816_398297847022038_803876945_n.jpg"},
{"id":"0qPcnuI4Pr","username":"carrotcreative","time":1427306556,"type":"image","likes":80,"comments":4,"text":"#bitchesbebakin took it to another level today for @nporteschaikin and @slang800's #Carrotversaries today.","media":"https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xaf1/t51.2885-15/e15/10959049_1546104325652055_1320782099_n.jpg"},
{"id":"0WLnjlo4Ft","username":"carrotcreative","time":1426633460,"type":"image","likes":61,"comments":1,"text":"T-shirts speak louder than words. Come find us @sxsw.","media":"https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xfa1/t51.2885-15/e15/11032904_789885121108568_378908081_n.jpg"},

We can also scrape comments:

$ instagram-screen-scrape comments --post 0qPcnuI4Pr
[{"id":"948651188581269518","username":"johnlustina","time":1427308055,"text":"@margeauxlustina"},
{"id":"948682633420963943","username":"rita_xo","time":1427311804,"text":"👌@emilykalen"},
{"id":"948734454231433861","username":"david_berkhin","time":1427317981,"text":"looks so good!"},
{"id":"948824521079751272","username":"k.kate","time":1427328718,"text":"Macarons or a Petri dish full of cells? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"}]

By default, there is 1 line per post, making it easy to pipe into other tools. The following example uses wc -l to count how many posts are returned. As you can see, I don't post much.

$ instagram-screen-scrape posts -u slang800 | wc -l
2

JavaScript Module

The following example is in CoffeeScript.

{InstagramPosts} = require 'instagram-screen-scrape'

# create the stream
streamOfPosts = new InstagramPosts(username: 'slang800')

# do something interesting with the stream
streamOfPosts.on('data', (post) ->
  # since it's an object-mode stream, we get objects from it and don't need to
  # parse JSON or anything

  # the time field is represented in UNIX time
  time = new Date(post.time * 1000)

  # output something like "slang800's post from 4/5/2015 got 1 like(s), and 0
  # comment(s)"
  console.log "slang800's post from #{time.toLocaleDateString()} got
  #{post.likes} like(s), and #{post.comments} comment(s)"
)

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

var InstagramPosts, streamOfPosts;
InstagramPosts = require('instagram-screen-scrape').InstagramPosts;

streamOfPosts = new InstagramPosts({
  username: 'slang800'
});

streamOfPosts.on('data', function(post) {
  var time = new Date(post.time * 1000);
  console.log([
    "slang800's post from ",
    time.toLocaleDateString(),
    " got ",
    post.likes,
    " like(s), and ",
    post.comments,
    " comment(s)"
  ].join(''));
});

And we can scrape comments in a similar manner (shown in CoffeeScript):

{InstagramComments} = require 'instagram-screen-scrape'

streamOfComments = new InstagramComments(post: '0qPcnuI4Pr')

# do something interesting with the stream
streamOfComments.on('data', (comment) ->
  # the time field is represented in UNIX time
  time = new Date(comment.time * 1000)

  console.log "#{comment.username} commented on #{time.toLocaleDateString()}:
  #{comment.text}"
)

Why?

The fact that Instagram requires an app to be registered just to access the data that is publicly available on their site is excessively controlling. Scripts should be able to consume the same data as people, and with the same level of authentication. Sadly, Instagram doesn't provide an open, structured, and machine readable API.

So, we're forced to use a method that Instagram cannot effectively shut down without harming themselves: scraping 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 markup.
  • You can't scrape protected accounts or get engagement rates / impression counts (cause it's not public duh).