Instructables DIY Project and Tutorial Scraper

Scrapes project metadata from Instructables.com — the canonical maker-tutorial index covering electronics, woodworking, 3D printing, sewing, cooking, and everything in between.

Returns one record per project. No step body text, no downloadable files — just metadata. Title, author, category, difficulty, step count, materials list, favorites, views, comments. The stuff you actually need to analyze or index a project corpus.

The site has 370k+ published projects across eight categories. The scraper covers all of them, with an optional category filter and sort order.

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What You Get

Field	Type	Notes
project_id	string	URL slug (e.g. DIY-Wooden-Bookshelf)
title	string	Project title
author_username	string	Instructables screen name
author_url	string	Author profile URL
category	string	Top-level category (circuits, workshop, craft, cooking, living, outside, design)
channel	string	Sub-category (e.g. arduino, woodworking, knitting-and-crochet)
difficulty	string	Project type (e.g. "Step by Step")
step_count	integer	Number of steps
materials_summary	string[]	Materials/supplies list
favorites_count	integer	Community favorites
views_count	integer	Total views
comments_count	integer	Comment count
is_featured	boolean	Editor-featured project
contest_entered	string	Contest name if the project was entered
published_at	string	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
thumbnail_url	string	Cover image URL
project_url	string	Full project URL

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Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum projects to return. Leave empty for no limit.
category	string	(all)	Filter by category: circuits, workshop, craft, cooking, living, outside, design, teachers.
sortBy	string	Newest	Sort order: Newest, Views, or Favorites.

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Usage

Broad corpus export

Leave category empty. Set sortBy: Newest and a high maxItems to pull a recent cross-craft sample. The corpus spans electronics through woodworking to cooking — broad enough for most content intelligence or dataset use cases.

Focused category pull

Set category: circuits and sortBy: Views to get the most-viewed electronics projects. Same for workshop, craft, etc. The category filter maps to Instructables' top-level taxonomy.

Dataset research

Run with maxItems: 5 to preview the field shape before committing to a full corpus pull. The output is consistent across categories.

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How It Works

The scraper calls Instructables' internal Typesense search API (/api_proxy/search) — the same endpoint their front-end uses for project listing pages. For each project, it also calls /json-api/showInstructableModel to retrieve step count, materials, and difficulty. No browser required.

The Typesense API key is a scoped key embedded in the page context at startup. The scraper fetches it once at run start and reuses it for all listing requests.

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Limits and Notes

• Robots.txt crawl delay: 1 second. The scraper paces itself accordingly.
• Rate limits: Instructables does not publish official rate limits. The scraper is conservative by default.
• Materials: Some projects have empty supplies sections — that's the site content, not a scraper issue. materials_summary returns an empty array in those cases.
• Copyright: This scraper returns metadata only. Step-by-step instructional text and downloadable files are creator-owned — they are intentionally excluded.

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Pricing

Pay-per-result via OrbTop PPE. Standard profile: $0.10/start + $0.001/project at free tier.

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Built by OrbTop.