Pinterest Pins Grabber

What is it

This is something I wrote back in the summer of 2014 when Pinterest had no public API for grabbing a user’s public pins. It’s built with NodeJS and leverages the public data on the Pinterest website. It is a great way to backup your own pins, but probably mostly serves as an example of building a scraper. Do not use this against the Pinterest terms of service.

The relevant files are:

• pinterest-api.js - exposes the main API methods
• urls.js - handles all HTTP requests
• parser.js - handles reading HTML and parsing into JSON

You can run a test call from the command-line via:

node test.js <username>

API Methods

PinterestApi.getPinsPage(username[, bookmark][, headers], callback)

Asynchronous lookup of the pins for a user from one page, either specified by optional argument bookmark (defaults to the first page) and using an optional headers argument (in the form of an object).

The callback is called as callback(error, data), where data is an object containing:

• pins: array of pin objects
• nextBookmark: string for next page of pins (or null)

PinterestAPI.requestPins(username[, headers])

Asynchronous lookup of all pins for the given username across several paginations.

Returns a request object that triggers the following events:

• data: {pins: [], nextBookmark: string, page: number})
• error: e
• end: {pages: number, totalPins: int}

The "data" event can be triggered multiple times, depending on how many pins the given user has pinned. However, "error" and "end" will only get triggered once and mutually exclusively.

They can be listened to via:

var req = requestPins(username);
req.on('data', function(data) { ... });
req.on('error', function(error) { ... });
req.on('end', function(data) { ... });