Instagram web scraping spider built with Python Scrapy. This scraper is designed to scrape the following data from every post on a user's account:

• Post URL
• Image URL or Video URL
• Post Captions
• Date Posted
• Number of Likes
• Number of Comments

In this Instagram scraper, we're going to use:

• Scraper API as our proxy solution, as Instagram has pretty aggressive anti-scraping in place. You can sign up to a free account here which will give you 5,000 free requests.
• ScrapeOps to monitor our scrapers for free and alert us if they run into trouble. Live demo here: ScrapeOps Demo

Make sure Scrapy is installed:

pip install scrapy

Set the Instagram accounts you want to scrape, in the instagram.py spider file.

user_accounts = ['nike', 'adidas'] 

Signup to Scraper API and get your free API key that allows you to scrape 1,000 pages per month for free. Enter your API key into the API variable:

API = ‘<YOUR_API_KEY>’

def get_url(url):
    payload = {'api_key': API, 'url': url}
    proxy_url = 'http://api.scraperapi.com/?' + urlencode(payload)
    return proxy_url

By default, the spider is set to have a max concurrency of 5 concurrent requests as this the max concurrency allowed on Scraper APIs free plan. If you have a plan with higher concurrency then make sure to increase the max concurrency in the settings.py.

## settings.py

CONCURRENT_REQUESTS = 5
RETRY_TIMES = 5

# DOWNLOAD_DELAY
# RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY

We should also set RETRY_TIMES to tell Scrapy to retry any failed requests (to 5 for example) and make sure that DOWNLOAD_DELAY and RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY aren’t enabled as these will lower your concurrency and are not needed with Scraper API.

ScrapeOps is already integrated into the scraper via the settings.py file. However, to use it you must:

Install the ScrapeOps Scrapy SDK on your machine.

pip install scrapeops-scrapy

And sign up for a free ScrapeOps account here so you can insert your API Key into the settings.py file:

    ## settings.py
    
    ## Add Your ScrapeOps API key
    SCRAPEOPS_API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
    
    ## Add In The ScrapeOps Extension
    EXTENSIONS = {
     'scrapeops_scrapy.extension.ScrapeOpsMonitor': 500, 
    }
    
    ## Update The Download Middlewares
    DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = { 
	'scrapeops_scrapy.middleware.retry.RetryMiddleware': 550, 
	'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware': None, 
    }

From there, our scraping stats will be automatically logged and automatically shipped to our dashboard.

To run the spider, use:

scrapy crawl instagram -o test.csv