Instagram Standalone Post/Profile Scraper

Standalone Apify Actor for scraping Instagram profile feeds, direct post/reel links, profile details, and visible/latest comments.

This actor is designed to be compatible with the post/profile scraping workflow used in fabulate-dagster while avoiding the wrapper approach.

Key points

• standalone scraper, not a wrapper to apify/instagram-scraper
• uses Apify Proxy by default
• blocks images, media, fonts, and stylesheets during page load to reduce bandwidth and proxy spend
• supports profile URLs and direct post/reel URLs
• uses an API-first profile feed path and only uses DOM comment extraction on direct post/reel pages
• keeps output compatible with the fields used by the Dagster Instagram post pipeline

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Supported input modes

Currently supported:

• resultsType: "posts"
• resultsType: "details"
• resultsType: "comments"
• resultsType: "reels"
• directUrls

Currently not supported in standalone mode:

• search-only scraping
• mentions
• stories
• hashtag/place discovery

If no directUrls are provided, the actor fails with a clear error.

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Input example

{
  "resultsType": "posts",
  "directUrls": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/instagram/"
  ],
  "resultsLimit": 3,
  "addParentData": true,
  "skipPinnedPosts": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Proxy behavior

If you do not pass proxyConfiguration, the actor defaults to:

{
  "useApifyProxy": true,
  "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
}

This is recommended for Instagram on Apify cloud. Datacenter IPs are more likely to get redirected to the Instagram login page.

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Output

The actor emits Instagram-like result objects for:

• profile feed posts
• direct post/reel URLs
• profile detail objects
• comment objects

For profile feeds, latestComments comes from timeline/preview data when available. For direct post/reel URLs and resultsType="comments", the actor extracts the visible comments rendered on the page.

Reference schemas are documented here:

• docs/schemas/instagram-output.schema.json
• docs/schemas/instagram-post.schema.json
• docs/schemas/instagram-comment.schema.json
• docs/schemas/instagram-profile.schema.json
• docs/schemas/instagram-hashtag.schema.json
• docs/schemas/instagram-place.schema.json

These schema files are documentation aids. The actual actor dataset remains permissive.

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Why page loading is cheaper

This standalone actor blocks these resource types during navigation:

• images
• media
• fonts
• stylesheets

It also blocks common Instagram CDN media hosts.

That means page HTML and JavaScript still load, but heavy media payloads do not.

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Local run

npm install
apify run --input-file=input.json

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Dagster compatibility scope

This actor is intended to replace the post/profile scraping use of apify/instagram-scraper in fabulate_dagster/ops/scrape_insta.py.

It is not intended to replace the separate Instagram story actor.

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Testing

See:

• docs/TESTING.md

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Technical details

See:

• docs/IMPLEMENTATION.md

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License

ISC