Instagram Followers Scraper

Overview

This Apify actor extracts specific profile metadata from Instagram. It sends profile URLs to an external API and returns a clean dataset containing only the requested fields, avoiding unnecessary data.

Key Features

• Targeted Data Extraction: Fetches only the specified profile fields, keeping the output dataset compact.
• Robust Field Parsing: Handles variations in the API's response structure by searching multiple possible key names and nested paths for each field.
• Proxy Support: Configurable to use Apify Proxy, including residential proxies and country selection.
• Concurrent Processing: Allows control over the number of simultaneous HTTP requests to the API.

How to Use

Run the actor on the Apify platform by providing input configuration. The results will be available in the Dataset. For local development, the script can be run but requires handling Apify SDK environment dependencies.

Input Configuration

Provide input as JSON when starting the actor. The main parameters are:

Example Input:

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/" },
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/mrbean/" }
  ],
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Output Data

Each item in the output dataset contains the following fields, extracted on a best-effort basis (values may be null if the API returns an unexpected schema):

• profile_url: The input profile URL.
• status: Request status ("ok", "failed", or raw API status).
• follower_count: Integer count of followers.
• following_count: Integer count of accounts followed.
• full_name: Profile display name.
• page_id: Numeric or string profile ID.
• page_name: Username/handle.
• number_of_members: Subscriber/member count.
• bio_links: List of links from the bio (normalized from various API formats).

Example Output:

[
  {
    "profile_url": "https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/",
    "status": "success",
    "follower_count": 665250679,
    "following_count": 614,
    "full_name": "Cristiano Ronaldo",
    "page_id": "173560420",
    "page_name": "Cristiano Ronaldo",
    "number_of_members": 11769643,
    "bio_links": [ "http://avacr7.com/en" ]
  }
]

Implementation Notes

• The actor uses httpx.AsyncClient to POST multipart/form-data to the external API endpoint.
• When proxyConfiguration.useApifyProxy is true, it uses Actor.create_proxy_configuration(...) and .new_url().
• Some fields like hd_profile_pic_url_info are returned as their original object if a simple URL string cannot be reliably extracted.