Best Practices

This is a best practices guide around using the Instagram API so that you don’t get rate limited or banned.

Use a Proxy

If you’re getting errors like this

• “The username you entered doesn’t appear to belong to an account. Please check your username and try again.”

Or you notice that Instagram is sending you emails about a suspicious login attempt, you should consider using a proxy. You are getting rate limited by Instagram or they are suspicious of your location.

You should have an IP address that you use consistently per user when making API requests. This will be less suspicious than using a different IP address every time you make a request.

From our experience, here are safe limits we’ve seen for various actions:

• using 10 accounts per IP address
• publishing 4-16 posts for each account
• publishing 24-48 stories

We recommend using the SOAX proxy service. Here’s an example of using it with instagrapi

from instagrapi import Client

cl = Client()
before_ip = cl._send_public_request("https://api.ipify.org/")
cl.set_proxy("http://<api_key>:wifi;ca;;;toronto@proxy.soax.com:9137")
after_ip = cl._send_public_request("https://api.ipify.org/")

print(f"Before: {before_ip}")
print(f"After: {after_ip}")

Add Delays

It’s recommended you try to mimic the behavior of a real user. This means you should add delays between requests. The delays should be random and not too long.

The following is a good example of how to add delays between requests.

from instagrapi import Client

cl = Client()

# adds a random delay between 1 and 3 seconds after each request
cl.delay_range = [1, 3]

Use Sessions

When using .login() you will login and create a new session with Instagram every time. This is suspicious for Instagram. For example, when you use your mobile device, you login to Instagram once and then you can use it for a long time without logging in again. This is because Instagram stores your session on your device and you can use it to login to Instagram without entering your username and password again.

To mimic this behavior, you can use the .login() method once to create a session and then store that session using .dump_settings() and then load it again using .load_settings().

The first time you run your script

from instagrapi import Client

cl = Client()
cl.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD)
cl.dump_settings("session.json")

And the next time

from instagrapi import Client

cl = Client()
cl.load_settings("session.json")
cl.login (USERNAME, PASSWORD) # this doesn't actually login using username/password but uses the session
cl.get_timeline_feed() # check session

You’ll notice we do a call to cl.get_timeline_feed() to check if the session is valid. If it’s not valid, you’ll get an exception.

Putting this all together, we could write a login function like this

from instagrapi import Client
from instagrapi.exceptions import LoginRequired
import logging

logger = logging.getLogger()

def login_user():
    """
    Attempts to login to Instagram using either the provided session information
    or the provided username and password.
    """

    cl = Client()
    session = cl.load_settings("session.json")

    login_via_session = False
    login_via_pw = False

    if session:
        try:
            cl.set_settings(session)
            cl.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD)

            # check if session is valid
            try:
                cl.get_timeline_feed()
            except LoginRequired:
                logger.info("Session is invalid, need to login via username and password")

                old_session = cl.get_settings()

                # use the same device uuids across logins
                cl.set_settings({})
                cl.set_uuids(old_session["uuids"])

                cl.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD)
            login_via_session = True
        except Exception as e:
            logger.info("Couldn't login user using session information: %s" % e)

    if not login_via_session:
        try:
            logger.info("Attempting to login via username and password. username: %s" % USERNAME)
            if cl.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD):
                login_via_pw = True
        except Exception as e:
            logger.info("Couldn't login user using username and password: %s" % e)

    if not login_via_pw and not login_via_session:
        raise Exception("Couldn't login user with either password or session")