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
Top comments (0)