Download Instagram reels by scraping using NodeJS

Introduction

Today, we are going to use web scraping in NodeJS to extract direct download links for Instagram Reels Video

Install Required NPM Packages

Puppeteer : Puppeteer is a Node.js library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome/Chromium ( Browser )

Cheerio : Cheerio is a HTML DOM parser and helps us traverse raw HTML and XML

npm install puppeteer
npm install cheerio

Firs, we need get the raw generated HTML, using Pupperteer and then parse the HTML using Cheerio to extract out the direct download link.

Note: We are using Puppeteer to get the HTML because the video link is hydrated into the page using Javascript. If, we use a simple request to get the raw HTML, the video tag won't be available

First Step (Get the raw HTML)

This is how the raw HTML looks likes when we inspect the page

Define a function that gets the raw HTML, including the video tag

async function getHTML(url) {
  // Launch a headless browser instance
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: "new" });

  // Create a new page
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // Navigate to a URL
  await page.goto(url);

  // Wait for the video tag to appear
  await page.waitForSelector("video");

  // Get the HTML content
  const html = await page.content();

  // Close the browser
  await page.close();
  await browser.close();

  // Return the HTML content
  return html;
}

Second Step (Parse the raw HTML)

We are going to parse the raw HTML, that we get from the getHTML() function

async function getReelVideo(url) {
  const html = await getHTML(url);

  // calls cheerio to process the html received
  const $ = cheerio.load(html);

  // Searches the html for the video tag and get the src atttribute
  const videoDirectLink = $("video").attr("src");

  // returns the direct video link
  return videoDirectLink;
}

Last Part

Now we can run the getReelVideo() function the get direct download link of a Instagram Reel

getReelVideo("https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrQ9TvAAuRe/").then((link) =>
  console.log(link)
);

Output:

https://instagram.fccu19-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t66.30100-16/120641351_1702239160229021_7989127058867652451_n.mp4?_nc_ht=instagram.fccu19-1.fna.fbcdn.net&_nc_cat=105&_nc_ohc=QoyEWM5tB-AAX_8SGz5&edm=AP_V10EBAAAA&ccb=7-5&oh=00_AfAU1hwxYlztdGfqHxpNxyTBDCOzNnLwBw7KnEdj7dLAuw&oe=6463ADB1&_nc_sid=4f375e