Insta Profile Fetcher Pro

Apify actor that scrapes public Instagram profile data. It tries Instagram's web profile API first, then falls back to HTML if the API response is blocked or incomplete.

Version: 1.9

Features

• Accepts usernames or full Instagram profile URLs
• Deduplicates and normalizes input (@user, user, https://www.instagram.com/user/)
• Returns profile metadata and, optionally, up to 12 latest posts
• Session warmup, cookie reuse, and retries for blocks and transient errors
• Proxy support: Apify residential, custom residential URL, or no proxy

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
profiles	string[]	—	Required. Instagram usernames or profile URLs
proxyMode	"none" | "residential" | "apify"	"apify"	How requests are proxied
residentialProxyUrl	string	—	Full proxy URL when proxyMode is "residential" (e.g. http://user:pass@host:port). Can also be set via RESIDENTIAL_PROXY_URL
maxRequestRetries	integer	2	Retries per failed username
desiredConcurrency	integer	1	Target parallel requests. Keep low to reduce Instagram blocks
maxConcurrency	integer	1	Maximum parallel requests
includeLatestPosts	boolean	true	Include up to 12 latest posts per profile

Example

{
  "profiles": [
    "instagram",
    "https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/",
    "@therock"
  ],
  "proxyMode": "apify",
  "maxRequestRetries": 2,
  "desiredConcurrency": 1,
  "maxConcurrency": 1,
  "includeLatestPosts": true
}

Output

Each successful profile is pushed to the default dataset:

{
  "inputUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/",
  "id": "173560420",
  "username": "cristiano",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/",
  "fullName": "Cristiano Ronaldo",
  "biography": "...",
  "externalUrl": "https://...",
  "externalUrls": [
    {
      "title": "",
      "lynx_url": "",
      "url": "https://...",
      "link_type": "external"
    }
  ],
  "followersCount": 650000000,
  "followsCount": 580,
  "postsCount": 3800,
  "private": false,
  "verified": true,
  "isBusinessAccount": false,
  "profilePicUrl": "https://...",
  "profilePicUrlHD": "https://...",
  "latestPosts": []
}

Failed usernames are also written to the dataset:

{
  "success": false,
  "failed": true,
  "requestedUsername": "missing_user",
  "username": "missing_user",
  "error": "Profile not found for missing_user",
  "errorType": "ProfileNotFoundError",
  "retryCount": 0,
  "timestamp": "2026-09-13T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Latest posts

When includeLatestPosts is enabled, each post can include id, type (Image, Video, Sidecar), shortCode, caption, hashtags, mentions, url, likesCount, commentsCount, displayUrl, timestamp, ownerUsername, ownerId, and sidecar childPosts.

How it works

1. Normalize and dedupe usernames from input.profiles.
2. Enqueue profile requests in batches of 500.
3. Warm up an Instagram session (homepage + profile page) to collect cookies.
4. Fetch https://www.instagram.com/api/v1/users/web_profile_info/?username=....
5. If the API result is unusable, parse the public profile HTML instead.
6. Push the result (or a failure record) to the Apify dataset.

Sessions rotate after 5 uses. Blocked and temporary errors are retried; not-found and invalid responses are not.

Local development

Requires Node.js 18+.

npm install
npm start

The actor reads input from Apify (Actor.getInput()). For a one-off local profile test:

$npm run test:profile -- cristiano

Optional env vars for the test script:

• PROXY_MODE=apify (default) or none
• RESIDENTIAL_PROXY_URL when using a custom residential proxy in a full actor run

Notes

• Public profiles only. Private accounts will not return post content.
• Instagram rate-limits aggressively. Prefer residential proxies and low concurrency.
• This actor is for collecting publicly available profile information. Follow Instagram's terms and applicable law.