ai2010 / instanalytics

Monitor Instagram accounts without using API

InstAnalytics

About

Each day, this Python script scraps the web version of Instagram, to get the number of posts, followers, following + likes and comments per photo from any public account. The data is then stored in a JSON file (data/InstAnalytics.json) so you can get track its growth.

As I made it to run on my Raspberry Pi, it uses PhantomJS, a lightweight headless browser (which is perfect for a RPi, especially in terms of resources consumption).

For more info, check out my blog post.

Requirements

Before you can run InstAnalytics.py, you will need to install a few Python dependencies.

Note: Python 2.7.9 and later (on the python2 series), and Python 3.4 and later include pip by default, so you may have pip already. Otherwise, you can install easy_install sudo apt-get install python-setuptools to install pip sudo easy_install pip.

• BeautifulSoup4, for parsing html: pip install BeautifulSoup4
• Selenium, for browser automation: pip install Selenium

PhantomJS:

• On Windows, download the binary from the official website and put it in the same folder than InstAnalytics.py.
• On OS X Yosemite, the binary provided by the PhantomJS crew doesn't work (selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'Can not connect to GhostDriver'). You can either compile it by yourself or download the binary provided by the awesome eugene1g. Then put it in the /usr/local folder.
• It's the same for Raspbian : compile it and put it in the /usr/bin folder or download the binary provided by the awesome spfaffly.

If you want to built your own binaries, here is the build instructions for PhantomJS.

If you plan to change the browser to Firefox or Chrome, edit the line browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(desired_capabilities=dcap) to browser = webdriver.Firefox() or browser = webdriver.Chrome(). To use Firefox you don't need anything more. For Chrome, first get the webdriver then put it in the same folder than InstAnalytics.py if you are on Windows, or in the /usr/local folder if you are on OS X.

Configuration

Before you run InstAnalytics.py, edit the users = ['yotta_life'] list to add as much as you want public Instagram accounts. It's that simple!

JSON output example

[
    {
        "username": "yotta_life", 
        "date": "2016-04-21", 
        "data": {
            "following": 231, 
            "followers": 649000, 
            "pLikesT": 2029474, 
            "posts": 608, 
            "photos": [
                {
                    "pId": "BEZLlc8sU_v", 
                    "pLikes": 4486, 
                    "pComments": 205
                }, 
                ...
                {
                    "pId": "uuhChFMU92", 
                    "pLikes": 282, 
                    "pComments": 19
                }
            ]
        }
    }
]

The complete output is available here: https://gist.github.com/helloitsim/c3a6ce83e302a1279398b896c1c36ccb.