Nodejs Instagram videos downloader not working

Question

I am working on downloading videos from Instagram. I have tried these two packages : https://www.npmjs.com/package/instagram-url-direct https://www.npmjs.com/package/instagram-save

Example of instagram-save

const save = require('instagram-save');

app.get('/i/download/mp4', (req, res) => { 
 const url = 'https://www.instagram.com/reel/CYgT8zHKQjp/?utm_medium=copy_link';
 save(url, 'myDir').then(res => {
   console.log(res.file);
 });
})

while doing this I am getting this error and my app crashed

node_modules\request\request.js:231
    return self.emit('error', new Error('options.uri is a required argument'))
                              ^

Error: options.uri is a required argument
    at Request.init (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\request\request.js:231:31)
    at Request.RP$initInterceptor [as init] (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\request-promise\lib\rp.js:123:25)
    at new Request (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\request\request.js:127:8)
    at request (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\request\index.js:53:10)
    at Function.head (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\request\index.js:61:12)
    at D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\instagram-save\lib\download-and-save.js:13:13
    at new Promise (<anonymous>)
    at downloadAndSave (D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\instagram-save\lib\download-and-save.js:12:10)
    at D:\YI2D\youtube-api\node_modules\instagram-save\index.js:23:9
[nodemon] app crashed - waiting for file changes before starting...

Any other way to do this?

Answer 1

Firstly,

1. Initialize a package.json file with default values.

npm init -y

2. Install the NPM packages that is needed

npm i express cors axios cheerio

If you’ve never used Node.js — the Express package gives us a server, Cors allows us to make requests from different origins(i.e if you had a frontend app on abc.com and your server was on def.com, CORS is the package that allows our server accept requests from different origins). Axios is the package for visiting a website and finally Cheerio is the package for inspecting and scraping elements on a Webpage.

3. Your start script should be changed to

node scraper.js

4. Let’s write the code. Create a scraper.js file in the root of your project. First we bring in our packages — express, cors, axios and cheerio.

We also need to call the app.use() method. This function calls all our middlewares. Think of middlewares as any function you want to run on every single request to our server. First, we call express.json() — this ensures that the requests coming into the server are in the JSON format. Secondly we call Cors() to ensure that if our frontend and backend are on different origins, they can still talk to each other.

5. Next, we create a getVideo() function. This is function takes a URL. Goes to that URL(using axios) and returns the result/response/page of that URL to Cheerio for scraping.

6. Now that we have defined the function that goes to Instagram and returns the videoString, we need a way to accept the URL users send in. This is where our express server comes in. This will also be an asynchronous function — i.e we need to wait for the result of the getVideo() function before we can return a response to the user.

7. And that’s it. We’re done. We can test our endpoint with postman.

The entire code for the frontend and backend is available here. Make sure to clone and star the repo.

There is another article on testing this app or any other Node.js app here.

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