Instagram crawler

Description

A simple Ruby script to download the full content of an instagram account or recent and top posts of an hashtag.

It currently doesn't support downloading stories.

Compatibility

Tested on Ruby 2.5 but should work with previous versions. Tested on:

• Windows 10 x64
• Linux x64

Usage

Install Ruby on your computer and launch the following command:

ruby ./instagram_crawler.rb [USERNAME...] [#HASHTAG...]

ruby ./instagram_crawler.rb [--update] [--update-users] [--update-hashtags]

You can put any number of usernames and hashtags in any order.

It will download the content of the instagram account or hashtag to ./username/* or ./#hashtag/*. The files will be named by their instagram id followed by .jpg for images and .mp4 for videos. For instagram accounts it will also download the profile picture to ./username/profile.jpg.

You can use --update, --update-hashtags or --update-users to respectively update all downloaded users and hashtags, hashtags or users.

If you want to download private users you have access to, you can set the COOKIE environment variable to the complete value that is sent by your browser when you browse https://www.instagram.com.

Examples

On Bash to use it you can do:

./instagram_crawler.rb adrientoub '#ruby' microsoft '#bash'
# or
./instagram_crawler.rb adrientoub \#ruby microsoft \#bash
# or
./instagram_crawler.rb --update-users
# or
./instagram_crawler.rb --update

On Powershell to use it you can do:

ruby .\instagram_crawler.rb adrientoub "#ruby" microsoft "#powershell"
# or
ruby .\instagram_crawler.rb --update-users
# or
ruby .\instagram_crawler.rb --update