Instabot

I created this tiny application so that I could ease the process of posting to Instagram. I didn't want to have to open up the app to post manually, but I still felt like it's good practice to share some of my photography on occasion. With a bit of configuration, this script will let you publish a photo with a caption of your choosing to an account for which you have login credentials!

Run it!

First time

1. conda env create environment.yml
2. sudo apt install firefox
3. chmod +x instabot.sh

Initialize your environment

1. Replace username and password in your config with your username and password. Remember never to commit & push your config!
2. Determine the classNames associated with a few different components on your Instagram web page. This is a little bit cumbersome, and I'll try to find a way around it, but for now this is the process 😞

Field	Screenshot
Replace new-post-selector with the className for the New Post button.
Replace button-selector with the className for the Next button. This should cover all of our major buttons.
Replace caption-selector with the className for the Textarea in the captioning flow.

Each time

1. bash -i instabot.bash
   • Replace sample_config.yml with your config file.
   • The sample_config.yml file is preloaded with reference to a couple of test images you can use to try the tool out.

Scheduling

I created this project so I could automate posting photos to Instagram. To run the script on a schedule, I'm using crontab.

1. Open up your crontab configuration to edit.
   • crontab -e
2. Add the entry to schedule the instabot.py script.
   • m h dom m dow DISPLAY=:0 /home/user/path/to/this-project/insta-bot/instabot.bash
     • The DISPLAY:=0 allows us to launch the Firefox browser via a cronjob in headless mode (i.e., without a display).

Built with

• Github Copilot
• Selenium