insta2blog.com

⁉️ Why did I create this?

A few days ago wife @za.yuliia was banned from instagram for her 🇺🇦 posts. There was no indication that her account would be restored. She felt awful about it, because she had spent a lot of time creating her page, her posts. Hopefully this tool would give her a reliable data backup that is easy to access.

Another reason would be my sister @alisa.shmarova is trying to be a blogger. She writes a lot of useful posts about travelling to different cities. Content on instagram is not searchable and is short-lived. The posts she writes are evergreen. Having a blog would let her content be evergreen and searchable.

Initially I was inspired with this idea after hearing of some guy who created "Sheets2Site".

💡 Value proposition

This is a media channel that you completely own. Your own auto-generated website.

Share urls to your posts on the blog to drive traffic to your website.

✔️ Core features

The application let's you "copy" a snapshot of your instagram posts on a regular basis.

You can search for posts content in the local copy of the account.

🤯 Instagram Basic Display API

Flow of connecting and using Instagram Basic Display API:

1. Get token

• authorization window
• successfull authorization gives an access code
• access code is exchanged for a short_lived_access_token (60 min valid)
• short_lived_access_token is exchanged for a long_lived_access_token (60 days valid)

2. Get data long_lived_access_token can be used to get:

• user profile data (username, media_count)
• detailed user_media data

3. Refresh token long_lived_access_token should be refreshed every 59 days.

API limitations: it does not get

• user avatar
• user description
• user website
• media comments
• media likes
• media location
• media stories

oAuth on localhost*

Set up https://localhost:3000/instagram/callback as a 'Valid OAuth Redirect URI', because Facebook allows only https, not http.

The redirect will go to the URL https://localhost:3000/instagram/callback?code=*** and give a Secure Connection Failed error. Change https to http in the redirected URL and submit.

💻 Tech stack

• ruby 3
• rails 7
• tailwind 3
• importmap-rails
• StimulusJS
• Hotwire/Turbo
• minitest
• sidekiq (coming soon)
• AWS S3 (coming soon)

🚀 Start the app

Clone app, start server

git clone git@github.com:yshmarov/insta2blog.com.git
cd insta2blog.com
bundle
rails db:setup
bin/dev

To properly use the app, you will need valid Instagram basic display API keys.

Add them to your credentials file. Example:

# credentials.yml
instagram:
  client_id: 123
  client_secret: abc123

The app uses gem data-migrate. To run data migrations together with regular ones:

rails db:migrate:with_data

🤝 Contributing

Check the dev roadmap

Got an idea 💡? Open an issue.

If you create a PR (if you can), preferably with tests 🙏.

Thanks for taking your time, wanderer!