My Instagram mention monitoring kept breaking, so I automated it
I got tired of checking Instagram manually. This was for a small online store. We wanted to notice when someone tagged the account or mentioned it, mostly so those posts wouldn't just sit there unnoticed. At first, I thought this would be a pretty simple thing to automate. It wasn't. My first setup was a mixture of manual checking and some scraping. It worked for a while, then stopped working…
The reporter found it tedious to manually check Instagram for mentions and tags related to a small online store. At first, the reporter tried a simple setup of manual checking and scraping, but it eventually stopped working reliably. After several attempts to fix the issue, the reporter returned to manual checking once again.
Frustrated with the unreliable setup, the reporter decided to simplify the workflow entirely. The reporter's new setup involves three main steps: checking for new Instagram activity, retrieving post and user data through an API, and comparing the data against what has already been processed to keep only the new items. The reporter uses HikerAPI for the Instagram API part, which provides REST endpoints that can be called from the automation instead of maintaining scraping code.
Here's an example of a request to the HikerAPI endpoint:
```
import requests
headers = {
"x-access-key": YOUR_KEY
}
user = requests.get(
"https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username",
params={"username": "google"},
headers=headers
).json()
r = requests.get(
"https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/stories",
params={"user_id": user["pk"]},
headers=headers
)
print(r.json())
```
The reporter kept the workflow deliberately simple to avoid unnecessary complexity. The new setup has been much easier to maintain compared to the previous one. The reporter is curious about other Instagram monitoring automation efforts and asks what small repetitive task others would automate next.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
