jcfischer/instapol

Instagram Scraper for political data

instapol

Instagram Scraper for political data

Prerequisites:

• Scraplify API key and subscription https://scrapfly.io/dashboard
• Python 3.11 (brew install python3)
• Required libraries: (pip3 install -r requirements.txt)
• Tesseract OCR engine (brew install Tesseract)
• SQLite Browser: https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/

Usage

1. Download the raw JSON files for an instagram account:

   $ python3 ./poller -u spschweiz

   If you need to restart and don't want to download everything again, you can specify the last cursor position that the script returned

   $ python3 ./poller -u spschweiz -c xxxyyyy

   and the download will start from that page

   This creates a JSON file for the account information (spschweiz.json) in the data directory and downloads all messages into a directory called spschweiz. The JSON files are named TIMESTAMP-ID.json where TIMESTAMP is the ISO-8601 date that the post was created and id is the Instagram ID

References

Basic original code to scrape Instagram taken from: https://scrapfly.io/blog/how-to-scrape-instagram/