How to Make an Instagram Bot With Python and InstaPy

Table of Contents

• How Instagram Bots Work
• How to Automate a Browser
• How to Use the Page Object Pattern
• How to Build an Instagram Bot With InstaPy
  • Essential Features
  • Additional Features in InstaPy
• Conclusion

What do SocialCaptain, Kicksta, Instavast, and many other companies have in common? They all help you reach a greater audience, gain more followers, and get more likes on Instagram while you hardly lift a finger. They do it all through automation, and people pay them a good deal of money for it. But you can do the same thing—for free—using InstaPy!

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a bot with Python and InstaPy, a library by Tim Großmann which automates your Instagram activities so that you gain more followers and likes with minimal manual input. Along the way, you’ll learn about browser automation with Selenium and the Page Object Pattern, which together serve as the basis for InstaPy.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• How Instagram bots work
• How to automate a browser with Selenium
• How to use the Page Object Pattern for better readability and testability
• How to build an Instagram bot with InstaPy

You’ll begin by learning how Instagram bots work before you build one.

Important: Make sure you check Instagram’s Terms of Use before implementing any kind of automation or scraping techniques.

How Instagram Bots Work

How can an automation script gain you more followers and likes? Before answering this question, think about how an actual person gains more followers and likes.

They do it by being consistently active on the platform. They post often, follow other people, and like and leave comments on other people’s posts. Bots work exactly the same way: They follow, like, and comment on a consistent basis according to the criteria you set.

The better the criteria you set, the better your results will be. You want to make sure you’re targeting the right groups because the people your bot interacts with on Instagram will be more likely to interact with your content.

For example, if you’re selling women’s clothing on Instagram, then you can instruct your bot to like, comment on, and follow mostly women or profiles whose posts include hashtags such as #beauty, #fashion, or #clothes. This makes it more likely that your target audience will notice your profile, follow you back, and start interacting with your posts.

How does it work on the technical side, though? You can’t use the Instagram Developer API since it is fairly limited for this purpose. Enter browser automation. It works in the following way:

1. You serve it your credentials.
2. You set the criteria for who to follow, what comments to leave, and which type of posts to like.
3. Your bot opens a browser, types in https://instagram.com on the address bar, logs in with your credentials, and starts doing the things you instructed it to do.

Next, you’ll build the initial version of your Instagram bot, which will automatically log in to your profile. Note that you won’t use InstaPy just yet.