Instavatar

A program that harvests profile pictures from Instagram. The avatar is then stored in a Firebase storage bucket for future use. This is to reduce the amount of requests to the Instagram API as too many will result in the account being blocked.

`IMPORTANT NOTICE`

Due to some remaining issues, it is currently only possible to use a locally-hosted version of `instavatar` paired with a local instance of the CORS server.

Getting started

In order to get started, create a Firebase account.

New project setup

After logging into Firebase with your Google account credentials, create a new project. Then set the project billing to the Blaze (paid) plan. This is a formality and a requirement to use storage, there shouldn't be any actual charges to the account.

Both Firestore and storage will need to be set up from within the Firebase console.

Set up Firebase locally

Run npm install -g firebase-tools to install the Firebase CLI. Then run firebase login from the root directory. No need to initialise the various Firebase services (hosting, Firestore database, functions and emulators) as the initialisation files are already included within the app.

Set up CORS reverse-proxy server

CORS headers need to be added to the Instagram API request in order for it to succeed. This is done by setting up a server. As noted in its readme, you will be able to test a proxied app such as instavatar if it's run in development mode (using localhost ports 3000 or 5000). That is, you can test instavatar locally using the remotely-hosted server provided there. To do so, simply leave the value of remoteProxyUrl unaltered. If you want to deploy instavatar so that it's also hosted remotely, you will need to set up your own instance of the CORS proxy server.

Configure variables

Run through the items labelled as TODO in the project. It is advised to do a global search in your code editor to find them all. They are listed below in any case.

Set the bucketId in index.mjs to the Firebase storage URL for the project. This can be accessed from the Firebase console in the browser.
When testing with a local proxy, the IS_LOCAL_PROXY flag can be left as true. However, when moving to a remotely hosted CORS proxy, change the flag to false.
There are four URLs that need to be changed. The first two are associated with the local and remote Firebase functions for this project that retrieve the Instagram avatar. The second pair are the local and remote URLs for the CORS proxy server which is the companion project as described previously.
Replace the value of the default field in .firebaserc with your Firebase project-id.

Development mode

Run npm run dev from the root directory. This starts all emulators as available from the localhost:4000 Firebase UI to enable local testing. Includes Firestore, Functions and Hosting emulators. As stated above, if just testing this app in development mode, the IS_LOCAL_PROXY flag can be set to false and the existing value of remoteProxyUrl can be used.

isoaxe/instavatar