instascrape: powerful Instagram data scraping toolkit

What is it?

InstaScrape is a lightweight JavaScript tool to scrape data from Instagram. This offers a practical way to gather structured information that can be made to work with regular web scraping, data analysis, and data science tools.

What you will get?

The application scans the comments of a specific Instagram post and generates a structured output that includes the username, comment, publish date, number of likes per comment, profile URL of the participant, and avatar URL. While this data is free to use, users are strongly encouraged to handle it ethically and responsibly, protecting the privacy and anonymity of participants.

How it works?

To use the project, just download the files, and next load the folder as an external script in the browser developer extension control settings.

Citation

Rui Bruno Santos. (2025). RuiBrunoSantos/Instascraper: Version 2.0 (2.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14612029

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024 Rui Bruno Santos

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

🙏 Contributing

All contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements, and ideas are welcome!

Feel free to open an Issue, check out existing Issues, or start a discussion.

Beginners to open source are highly encouraged to participate and ask questions if you're unsure what to do/where to start ❤️

DISCLAIMER:

Instagram has gotten increasingly strict with scraping and using this library can result in getting flagged for botting AND POSSIBLE DISABLING OF YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT. This is a research project and I am not responsible for how you use it. Independently, the library is designed to be responsible and respectful and it is up to you to decide what you do with it. I don't claim any responsibility if your Instagram account is affected by how you use this library.