Can't login to Instagram using requests

Question

I'm trying to login to Instagram using requests library. I succeeded using following script, however it doesn't work anymore. The password field becomes encrypted (checked the dev tools while logging in manually).

I've tried :

import re
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

link = 'https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/'
login_url = 'https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/'

payload = {
    'username': 'someusername',
    'password': 'somepassword',
    'enc_password': '',
    'queryParams': {},
    'optIntoOneTap': 'false'
}

with requests.Session() as s:
    r = s.get(link)
    csrf = re.findall(r"csrf_token\":\"(.*?)\"",r.text)[0]
    r = s.post(login_url,data=payload,headers={
        "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.120 Safari/537.36",
        "x-requested-with": "XMLHttpRequest",
        "referer": "https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/",
        "x-csrftoken":csrf
    })
    print(r.status_code)
    print(r.url)

I found using dev tools:

username: someusername
enc_password: #PWD_INSTAGRAM_BROWSER:10:1592421027:ARpQAAm7pp/etjy2dMjVtPRdJFRPu8FAGILBRyupINxLckJ3QO0u0RLmU5NaONYK2G0jQt+78BBDBxR9nrUsufbZgR02YvR8BLcHS4uN8Gu88O2Z2mQU9AH3C0Z2NpDPpS22uqUYhxDKcYS5cA==
queryParams: {"oneTapUsers":"[\"36990119985\"]"}
optIntoOneTap: false

How can I login to Instagram using requests?

Answer 1

You can use authentication version 0 - plain password, no encryption:

import re
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

from datetime import datetime

link = 'https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/'
login_url = 'https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/'

time = int(datetime.now().timestamp())

payload = {
    'username': '<USERNAME HERE>',
    'enc_password': f'#PWD_INSTAGRAM_BROWSER:0:{time}:<PLAIN PASSWORD HERE>',  # <-- note the '0' - that means we want to use plain passwords
    'queryParams': {},
    'optIntoOneTap': 'false'
}

with requests.Session() as s:
    r = s.get(link)
    csrf = re.findall(r"csrf_token\":\"(.*?)\"",r.text)[0]
    r = s.post(login_url,data=payload,headers={
        "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.120 Safari/537.36",
        "x-requested-with": "XMLHttpRequest",
        "referer": "https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/",
        "x-csrftoken":csrf
    })
    print(r.status_code)
    print(r.url)
    print(r.text)

Prints:

200
https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/
{"authenticated": true, "user": true, "userId": "XXXXXXXX", "oneTapPrompt": true, "reactivated": true, "status": "ok"}