Get the last n posts from your Instagram account and download them into your server, so you don't need to call the API every time a user requests the page, and call a local file instead.
We only provide access to:
- Post image
- Post URL
The reason for this is that the "Instagram Basic Display API" can only get basic data.
Because seems that Facebook's Instagram is blocking/black-listing IPs that are making recurrent calls to their ?__a=1 public endpoint. So this is kinda a workaround for that.
This software/script is build on top of the Facebook's "Instagram Basic Display" and it needs instagram-basic-display-php (and its requirements) to work.
- Instagram User Token (both)
- PHP 7 or higher (both*)
- cURL (only instagram-basic-display-php)
- PHP's
file_get_contents()enabled (only ig-api-scrapper-php)
You can install instagram-basic-display-php using Composer:
$ composer require espresso-dev/instagram-basic-display-php
We assume you already have an "Instagram User Token", if you don't have one and don't know where to find it, you can follow this tutorial from the project's Wiki page.
* Even if this script doesn't need PHP 7+ –since we use functions available in 5.x–, it's recommended to use 7+ because it's awesome.
This script will connect to your Instagram account using the Instagram User Token, get the last n posts (read "Configuration"), check if the last one is already inside the "dist" folder (read "Installation"), if it is no there it will download the last n posts in the "tmp" folder, and finally replace the "dist" folder content –erasing everything inside that directory!– with the new content from "tmp" –erasing everything inside that directory!–.
This way we provide near-zero downtime, which may vary depending on how fast your system is for moving files from one folder to another (which usually is a quite light task).
The downloaded images have this format: <POST_NUMBER>-<URL_CODE>-.jpg So, if you download your last 6 posts, the last file will be named something like: 6-abc123.jpg We include a simple example of how to get this posts and their URLs in the index.php file, which will be empty until you execute the script provided in the section "Try it" of this document.
You just need to place both ig-cronjob.php and ig-cronjob.ini in your project's root folder.
Then create the required folder structure:
your-site/
└── assets/
└── ig/
├── dist/
├── log/
└── tmp/
You can create those using mkdir
Replace /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ with your own /path/to/your-site/
$ mkdir -p /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/assets/ig/{dist,log,tmp}
You need to set the number of posts you want to get from your feed (by default it gets 6) and the Instagram User Token (see how to get it here). This can be done renaming or copying the provided ig-cronjob-sample.ini file to ig-cronjob.ini
Replace /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ with your own /path/to/your-site/
# Copy it
$ cp /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob-sample.ini /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob.ini
# Or rename it
$ mv /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob-sample.ini /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob.ini
In that ig-cronjob.ini file you should add your token to instagram_user_token and set the number of photos you want to get in post_to_get (both inside the quotation marks).
Example:
[config]
instagram_user_token = "abc123"
post_to_get = "3"
You can get up to 99 posts from the API.
You should NEVER commit the ig-cronjob.ini file to any [public] version control system (e.g. Github, Gitlab, whatever) since it includes the Instagram User Token of the linked Instagram account. That is a private and secret token and should not be shared to any external developers. To be sure, just add the ig-cronjob.ini to your .gitignore file (as well as the log folder).
Is highly recommended that you block the access to any .ini and .log file in your server (if you don't already) so it cannot be used outside your server and cannot be seen entering the URL in the browser.
If you use Apache you can set it like this:
# Inside your .htaccess file
<FilesMatch "\.(ini|log)$|(\.*~)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>
If you use nginx you can set it like this:
# Inside your nginx config
location ~* (\.ini|\.log)$ {
deny all;
error_page 403 =404 / ;
}
You can get the first batch of posts using the script below, just to try how it works. It'll log any action in its own cron.log file.
Replace /path/to/php with your path to PHP (usually /usr/bin/php – you can get that path using which php in your terminal), and replace /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ with your own /path/to/your-site/
$ /path/to/php /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob.php >> /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/assets/ig/log/cron.log 2>&1
The cron.log file will be something like this:
[2020-06-19T04:20:10-03:00] [INFO] Starting download...
[2020-06-19T04:20:11-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #1: 1-B9wLmirAyhi.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:11-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #2: 2-B9kSpuugyFq.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:11-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #3: 3-B9e0E7iAMGh.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:12-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #4: 4-B9Z49MKAQD9.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:12-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #5: 5-B9JvSOxAYPl.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:12-03:00] [INFO] Downloaded post #6: 6-B82p3t3gAtR.jpg
[2020-06-19T04:20:12-03:00] [OK] Successfully downloaded last 6 posts
- The config file (
ig-cronjob.ini) was not found or is not accessible by PHP. It is expected to be found in the same root folder as theig-cronjob.phpfile.
[2020-06-19T04:20:05-03:00] [ERROR] Config file was not found, execution failed
The script works like a charm with a cronjob (as it's intended to be used, as you may have seen in the filenames).
Currently Facebook allows up to 240 calls per hour –per user, but this script only uses 1 user– to the "Basic Display API". This is probably more than we need if we're not really that active on Instagram, so any cronjob like the one provided below would be enough.
Replace /path/to/php with your path to PHP (usually /usr/bin/php – you can get that path using which php in your terminal), and replace /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ with your own /path/to/your-site/
*/10 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/ig-cronjob.php >> /path/to/ig-api-scrapper-php/assets/ig/log/cron.log 2>&1
This will check the current posts –and download the newer if needed– every 10 minutes, using just 6 calls per hour of our quota.
If you need to edit how often this cronjob is called, I recommend Crontab Guru to get a better understanding in schedule expressions.
- Check if IUT is valid
- Improve log system for main execution file
- Extend access to more API data, such as "captions" and "timestamp"
- Make it object-oriented
- Check for errors and return Exceptions
1.1 (2020-06-20)
- Update Instagram User Token variable in main config file
- Update Instagram User Token variable in main execution file
- Add changelog to
README.md
1.0 (2020-06-19)
- First version public available.