Accessing public Instagram content via Instagram API without expiring accesstoken

Question

i want to show public contents from instagram related to a specific hashtag (everything works fine with that) but i can't to renew the access_token everytime it expires.

("do not assume your access_token is valid forever." - https://www.instagram.com/developer/authentication/)

To renew it manually is not an option i have to make sure there is a valid access_token at ANY time without re-authenticating.

Any ideas or questions? :)

Answer 1

I have one idea, but without API (and access_token). You can make requests to the web-version of Instagram with ?__a=1 parameter. I do not know how long it will work but now there is workflow:

1. You want to show public content with hashtag space, for example.
2. Add it to url and add GET-parameter ?__a=1: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/space/?__a=1
3. Make the GET-request. It returns json with nodes in top_posts (8) and media (18). Each node has owner, caption, number of comments and likes. But the most important part is in thumbnail_src and display_src.
4. There is page_info in media object which helps to paginate results. You need end_cursor (for example, J0HWE9rjAAAAF0HWE9qvgAAAFiYA)
5. Add the value from end_cursor to the url: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/space/?__a=1&max_id=J0HWE9rjAAAAF0HWE9qvgAAAFiYA
6. Repeat 3-6 to get newest posts with specific hashtag.

Answer 2

Update to the ?__a=1 url param. This appears to have stopped working with users '/account/?__a=1' endpoints.:( Still works on tags apparently.

Answer 3

Instagram shut down their public API. Here's a quick and dirty workaround in PHP:

<?php
function getPublicInfo($username) {
    $url     = sprintf("https://www.instagram.com/$username");
    $content = file_get_contents($url);
    $content = explode("window._sharedData = ", $content)[1];
    $content = explode(";</script>", $content)[0];
    $data    = json_decode($content, true);
    return $data['entry_data']['ProfilePage'][0];
}

Not sure for how long it's gonna work. Here's one for Javascript.