olidroide / instascrape

Flexible, lightweight Python 3 Instagram scraper designed for data mining

Instagram scraping for humans

What is it?

instascrape is a powerful, lightweight library for scraping Instagram data with no configurations necessary! It is designed with flexibility and developer productivity in mind so you can stop wasting valuable time collecting data and just start analyzing 💪

Key features

• 💪 Powerful, object-oriented scraping tools as well as a variety of useful functions
• 💃 Flexibly determines whether you want to scrape HTML, JSON, BeautifulSoup, or request and scrape the URL itself
• 💾 Download content to your computer as png, jpg, mp4, and mp3
• 🎼 Expressive and consistent API for concise and elegant code
• 📊 Designed for seamless integration with Selenium, Pandas, and other industry standard tools for data collection and analysis
• 🔨 Lightweight: you don't have to build a hammer factory when all you need is the hammer
• 🕸️ The only hard dependencies are Requests and Beautiful Soup; no more worrying about configurations or webdrivers
• ⌚ Proven to work as of November, 2020

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Table of Contents

• 💻 Installation
• 🔎 Sample Usage
• 📚 Documentation
• 📰 Blog Posts
• 🙏 Contributing
• 🕸️ Dependencies
• 💳 License
• ❔ Support

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💻 Installation

Minimum Python version

This library currently requires Python 3.7 or higher.

pip

Install from PyPI using

$ pip3 install insta-scrape

WARNING: make sure you install insta-scrape and not a package with a similar name!

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🔎 Sample Usage

All top-level, ready-to-use features can be imported using:

from instascrape import *

instascrape uses clean, consistent, and expressive syntax to make the developer experience as painless as possible.

# Instantiate the scraper objects 
google = Profile('https://www.instagram.com/google/')
google_post = Post('https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0UU3ylXnv/')
google_hashtag = Hashtag('https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/google/')

# Scrape their respective data 
google.scrape()
google_post.scrape()
google_hashtag.scrape()

After being scraped, relevant attributes can be accessed with dot (.) or bracket ([]) notation

print(google.followers)
print(google_post['hashtags'])
print(google_hashtag.amount_of_posts)
>>> 12262794
>>> ['growwithgoogle']
>>> 9053408

📚 Documentation

The official documentation can be found on Read The Docs 📰

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📰 Blog Posts

Check out blog posts on DEV for ideas and tutorials!

• Scrape data from Instagram with instascrape
• Visualizing Instagram engagement with instascrape
• Exploratory data analysis of Instagram using instascrape and Python
• Creating a scatter matrix of Instagram data using Python
• Downloading an Instagram profile's recent photos using Python
• Scraping 25,000 data points from Joe Biden's Instagram using instascrape

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🙏 Contributing

All contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements, and ideas are welcome!

Feel free to open an Issue or look at existing Issues to get a dialogue going on what you want to see added/changed/fixed.

Beginners to open source are highly encouraged to participate and ask questions ❤️

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🕸️ Dependencies

Instascrape primarily relies on two third-party libraries for requesting and scraping Instagram HTML content:

1. Requests: HTTP requests
2. BeautifulSoup: Scraping and parsing HTML data.

The rest of its functionality is provided directly from Python 3's standard library for unobtrusive code under the hood with little to no overhead.

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💳 License

MIT

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❔ Support

Reach out to me if you have questions or ideas!

• Email:
  • [email protected]
• Instagram:
  • @chris_greening
• Twitter:
  • @ChrisGreening2

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