Instagram login programmatically

Question

I'm trying to programmatically login to Instagram via my own website because I want to retrieve direct messages from Instagram (this requires a login as it is not supported in the Instagram API (yet)). But the Instagram login page requires cookies to login.

I keep getting the message that the page could not be loaded and that I might need to enable cookies.

Is there any way possible to login programmatically via PHP to Instagram?

This is what I have so far.

$ch = curl_init('https://instagram.com/accounts/login/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^\r\n]*)/mi', $result, $ms);
$cookies = array();
foreach ($ms[1] as $m) {
   list($name, $value) = explode('=', $m, 2);
   $cookies[$name] = $value;
}

$ccode  = substr($cookies['ccode'], 0, 2);
$mid    = array_shift(explode(';', $cookies['mid']));
$csfrtoken = array_shift(explode(';', $cookies['csrftoken']));

$header = array();
$header[] = 'Accept: */*';
$header[] = 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate';
$header[] = 'Accept-Language: nl-NL,nl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4';
$header[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';
$header[] = 'Content-Length: 46';
$header[] = 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8';
$header[] = 'X-Instagram-AJAX: 1';
$header[] = 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest';

$ch = curl_init('https://instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'username=*****&password=*****&intent=');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, dirname(__FILE__).'/test.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, dirname(__FILE__).'/test.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, 'mid='.$mid.'; ccode='.$ccode.'; csrftoken='.$csfrtoken.';');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

$response = curl_exec($ch);

Answer 1

It looks like you were headed in the right direction, in your example, it seems that you get an authenticated response but a consequent request to an authenticated page does not work as expected.

I suspect that instagram is actively preventing this by running a check with an Ajax call or something similar.

As an alternative you can look at something like zombie.js.

This is a headless virtual browser where you can visit pages and interact with the elements on it, but you cant view them.

A simple example using zombie.js is as follows:

var Browser = require('zombie');
var browser = Browser.create();

browser.visit('https://instagram.com/', function() {
  browser.wait(10000, function(){
    browser.fill('input[name="username"]', 'myusername');
    browser.fill('input[type="password"]', 'mypasswd');
    browser.pressButton('Log in', function() {
      browser.visit('https://instagram.com/accounts/edit/', function() {
        console.log(browser.html());
      });
    });

  });

});

Hope it helps.