Over the past few weeks, I've spent some time researching about Instagram automation the goal being to have a program that can like and comment for me. I've come up with the following solutions:
Use a browser automation library like selenium to navigate through Instagram's website.
Cons: really botchy code that becomes useless as soon as Instagram renames their css classes which they do from time to time
Have a Android emulator running and automate that.
Cons: every instance of that emulator would require like 2 gigs of storage and would be really inefficient.
So how do for example apps on the play-/app store do it? They only have the small processing power of the phone available and still run effortless in the background.
Is there another solution that I'm missing?
The most efficient way to automate Instagram is to use the Instagram API. Using that API you can publish photos with users, tags and locations [1]. I don't find any immediate mention of Stories etc., but most likely if you work more with the API you find where/how to do that.
The also linked Instagram Platform API seems to be in a state of discontinuation.
As you tagged your question "Selenium", no, Selenium does not provide a reasonable approach for interfacing with Instagram as Selenium provides no way to make POST requests. You could try to automate the website through Selenium, but using the API is far more straightforward, less prone to layout changes and the officially sanctioned way.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/content-publishing
The way I did it at the end was that I used the Instagram Private API for Instagram on GitHub:
https://github.com/ping/instagram_private_api
That way I didn't have to emulate an entire device actually browsing through Instagram.
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me and my colleagues receive quiet many instagram dms accross all of our accounts and it became taxing to get ahold of everything which is why I want to automate the process.
If I want to filter my instagram messages on specific keywords and get an altert on dms that match certain keyword - do I need to use the instagram api or can I automate the process myself? Scraping content is against the api as far as I know, is it the same for dms?
If I have to use the api (sadly), am I the only one that has to setup the facebook app and can my colleagues also use the app with their accounts?
I fear that it might be against their tos if I dont use their api, I tried reading through the tos and developer guidelines but there is so much input.
But this seems like an against their terms of use to me.
I want to build a simple UI that surfaces a subset of the functionality of Google Ads UI by using the Google Ads API. Is there an example that shows how this can be done?
I believe there is no such thing, however there is a lot of examples on HOW to use the Google Ads API, and as a developer it's up to you how you want to turn that into a UI.
After all, WHAT you use the API for is entirely up to you, i.e. it is your design. Making the UI is a separate task from accessing the API, so a tutorial on how to design a UI is separate from how to access the API.
You can read about the Google Ads API here, and it's littered with examples. Warning, it has a pretty high technical level and just getting OAuth setup can prove to be a major hassle. Good Luck.
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Currently trying to figure out how to check whether or not very large Instagram accounts (10M+ followers) are following a list of 30-40k users. Scraping all followers doesn't seem to be a very viable solution, as Instagram rate limits at every ~10k requests (so naturally, scraping 50-60M usernames would take very long).
The Instagram app has a search-bar feature that obviously lets one check whether or not an account follows someone; however, I'm not entirely sure how to replicate this functionality on web.
Does anyone know of any ways to achieve this functionality through a Selenium-like bot and / or utilize the Instagram API?
Figured it out! For anyone who has a similar goal, I accomplished the above with two approaches:
1.) Appium / Selenium automation w/ Android emulator (takes advantage of the Instagram native-only search fucntionality)
2.) Overkill: Fiddler and patched Instagram APK (SSL cert-pinning disabled) to find the actual query to see whether a user is following another).
Is this possible?
The reason for asking is that the 2016 update with the Instagram API creates a sandbox and live environment. The sandbox is of limited value since you only get to use data of those users within the sandbox. If you get denied for the live upgrade, your existing application was wasted in effort.
I would like to identify a second possibility (such as HTTP?). Anything exists?
Looks like a valid use case for brands/businesses, complete the app make it look professional and get reviewed for public_content permission, submit a video of app.
No other way to get around, just follow the guidelines and get app approved.
Yes, this is possible with Selenium and Proxies
I am getting familiar with Google Sites. What I want is, building a Site front-end for a Google Spreadsheet.
I want to Display data from the Spreadsheet in the Google Site, later maybe some graphics as well. To my knowledge there are two ways to accomplish this, Apps Scripts and Gadgets. Building a Gadget seemed much more easy in the beginning, however gives me some trouble. After reading more about Apps Scripts I finally found a way to access the Spreadsheet and display data.
But reading a lot of google documentation, I wonder what really is the difference? In what cases should one use Gadgets and in what case Apps Scripts?
Maybe I am just a little overwhelmed but it would be nice to get some feedback from experiences developers in that field!
Thanks a lot.
Cheers,
Daniel
Google Apps Script is javascript, but run in server side. So it is not client side javascript like javascript Gadget or any HTML.
Google Apps Script use GWT, which generate client side Javascript.
Gadget is XML code containing HTML inside
which means gadget is text.
Google Apps Script is kinda JavaScript
which means GAS is code.
Might be the main difference.