Python script that emulates a human on Instagram. This bot watches the stories and likes the posts of the users specified.
- Install python3
- Install selenium
- Download the repo or the App folder
- Modify preferences.py inside Main
- Write the username to log into your Instagram account.
- Write the password to log into your Instagram account.
- Setting the right driver for the browser you wanna use.
- Change other settings if you want (see later section)
- Run main.py as a python script.
Python comes preinstalled in Linux and Mac. If for some reason you have python 2, you should install python 3. Try to follow this guide for Linux and this guide for Mac.
On Windows, go to the download page of python and download the windows installer (x32 or x64 depending on your computer). Run the installer and make sure that on that "Add python to PATH" is selected.
Then click "Install now". At the end, click on "Disable path length limit". Python is installed. To check that everything has gone well just open cmd and run the command python then it will prompt with a >>> where you can insert python code, like in the image:
There are multiple ways of installing selenium, in this section i will use pip. pip may come preinstalled so check if you have installed pip using the command pip3 -V or pip -V.
If it isn't installed, on Linux for most of the distros the command sudo apt install python3-pip should work, otherwise follow this guide. For Mac, try to follow this guide. For Windows, this guide.
Once pip is installed just run the command pip3 install selenium or pip install selenium.
These are the default preferences:
self.hours_of_sleep = 0
self.read_file_path = ""
self.accounts_hard_coded = ("kurzgesagt", "nasa", "wikipedia")
self.number_of_processes = 2
self.number_of_posts = 3
self.username = ""
self.password = ""
self.rest_time = 5
self.driver_function = drivers["Firefox"]["function"]
self.driver_string = drivers["Firefox"]["string"]In order for the bot to work properly, you must specify a username (or mail) and a password. It will log in with the username and password given and it will like the post and watch the stories using that account. Once done, the username and password should look something like this:
self.username = "fakemail@fakemail.com"
self.password = "mybeautifulpassword"There are two browser you can easily choose: Firefox and Chrome. If you choose Firefox the two lines about the driver should be:
self.driver_function = drivers["Firefox"]["function"]
self.driver_string = drivers["Firefox"]["string"]If you choose Chrome, the two lines about the driver should be:
self.driver_function = drivers["Chrome"]["function"]
self.driver_string = drivers["Chrome"]["string"]If you want to use other browser, you need to find the function to invoke to start the browser and the driver to pass as an argument.
Once you have chosen your browser, you need to download the relative driver. For Firefox is geckodriver and for Chrome is ChromeDriver. Download it and place it inside the folder Main in App.
In order to work properly, your browser should have as a language English. Different languages could make the code work only partially (for example the liking process will not like the posts).
The element that you probably wanna change is the list of usernames to use during execution. You must specify the actual username, not the name or other information about the account. There are two ways to specify the list: the text file and explicitly saying the accounts to use.
To use the text file, just write a text file that contains for each row only one username. Save the file and add the relative path of the file in self.read_file_path. For example, create a text file named accounts.txt and put it inside the Main folder, then you should change the preferences in this way:
self.read_file_path = "accounts.txt"To specify the accounts explicitly, self.read_file_path must be an empty string (self.read_file_path = ""), then just type the usernames inside the parenthesis, each user should be written inside the double quotes symbol and separated from the others with comma. Example of this are:
# Example 1
self.accounts_hard_coded = ("somebody", "somebodyelse")
# Example 2
self.accounts_hard_coded = ("username1", "username2", "username3", "username4", "username5", "username6", "username7")The code runs the bots concurrently. If you don't want to use your computer too much during the execution, just set the number of processes to 1: self.number_of_processes = 1. If you wanna use more processes, you can change the number as you like.
The bot runs concurrently for a functional requisite, but you can easily switch back and forth from multi-processing to multi-threading. To do that, change the function stories_and_posts_all in processor.py inside Processor. For multi-processing the line should be:
with concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor() as executor:
executor.map(stories_and_posts_group, tasks_collection)For multi-threading the line should be:
with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor() as executor:
executor.map(stories_and_posts_group, tasks_collection)The hours of sleep are the hours that the script is going to wait before starting the execution. It has a default of 0, so it will run immediately.
The number of posts are the maximum number of posts that the bot will like per each user.
The rest time is the time that the bot will wait after doing some action on the browser. A slower internet connection requires an higher rest time to execute the script properly.
Using the terminal or cmd (for windows), go to the folder where you have downloaded the repo and then go inside App and inside Main. Run main.py with python3 main.py or python main.py.
When you run the code, it will write any relevant information on a log file (named by the day it has been run): for each user, there will be a line following the pattern: User: story_state, post_state. For example, it could be kurzgesagt: watched the stories, liked the posts. It will also write errors that have occurred.
The example at the beginning of this file shows the code working for Firefox in Linux.
Here's an example working for Chrome in Windows:
If you decide to fork this repo or develop your own version, the description will help you clearly see the dependencies between classes and packages so it's easier to write cleaner code.
Distributed under the GNU license. See LICENSE for more information.