Instagram Bot

Over the past year, our friend circle on Instagram had a running competition that included trying to be the first commenter on members of our circle's posts. I almost never got first because I'm usually on my computer and not on my phone. I decided to create a bot that would refresh a person's page and if the bot detects a new post, it would comment "first" in around 5 seconds. I never planned on using this bot because it would remove the fun our friend circle had with the competition.

This bot was written with:

• puppeteer - Browser simulation
• cron - Repeated checks for new posts
• numeral - Convert "x posts" to x

Setup

This tutorial infers that you have a developer environment set up for NodeJS.

• IDE
• NodeJS v16.13.1
• NPM v8.1.2

First, create a json file called config.json. Then, paste the following code replaced with correct details into the file and save.

{
   "username": "instagram",
   "password": "notInstagramREALPassword123",
   "posts": 0,
   "userToTrack": "m_phelps00",
   "headless": false,
   "toType": "first"
}

Please replace the first two fields with the account details of the commenter. Then, replace userToTrack with the user you want to comment on first. Headless is used if you want to see the app working. If you don't, change headless to true. toType is what text you want to type.

Then, run

npm install

to install the required dependencies.

Next, run

npm run login

This will login and generate the cookie for the website.

Finally, start the bot with

npm start

Let me know if you have an issues with the issues tab in GitHub.