Instagram story download chrome code#

Now that we have our Stories data, we can iterate through every friend, generate an image with their profile picture, give it a nice circular border, and append them all in a row to create our Stories “tray”. The Instagram API will pleasantly take our cookie peace offering and give us back our Stories in return. We can retrieve two Instagram cookies called ‘ds_user_id’ and ‘sessionid’ using the ‘okies’ API and then inject them into our request’s headers. With our Chrome extension, we can use the ‘chrome.webRequest’ API to listen for requests, and then hook into the ‘onBeforeSendHeader’ event and intercept the headers, allowing us to modify them before sending the request. Normally when you make a request from the browser like an AJAX request (XMLHttpRequest), you can’t modify the headers. Since Chrome extensions are awesome, we can access the cookies if we request permission to access ’s data in our extension.īut how do we send these cookies in our request? Good question. Instagram’s desktop website saves cookies about your session to authenticate your requests. Now, what about authentication? This is where those sweet cookies 🍪🍪🍪 come in. This endpoint returns all the data associated with the “tray” or bar at the top of your feed with all your friends’ profile pictures. To get the list of Stories, simply make a GET request to: After getting Charles up and running, I opened up Instagram and immediately saw that Stories were being retrieved, and I was able to see the data transmitted by its endpoint.

So how do I get the data for my friends’ Stories? Well, Instagram’s Developer API doesn’t have an endpoint that supports such data, so I had to reverse engineer the internal API endpoint for Stories.īy using a proxy like Charles Proxy, one can view the decrypted SSL network requests and responses that are sent and received to one’s phone.

Instagram story download chrome code#

I’m an avid Chrome user, and Chrome extensions are pretty powerful, so I opted to build a Chrome extension to get the job done.Ĭhrome extensions allow you to inject code into the page, so all I needed was the data for my friends’ Stories and I could construct a UI that displays them all in a row, then inject it to the top of the feed, just like in the mobile app. I knew the best way to bring Instagram Stories to the web was through a browser extension. It will probably be a while, if at all, before Instagram brings Stories to the web, so I thought I’d do it myself. It took Instagram 2 years to build their first web app, and then another 3 years to implement web search. Instagram Stories recently came out, giving Instagram users a nearly identical experience as Snapchat Stories. EDIT: Due to a Cease & Desist letter from Facebook, I have taken down the Chrome extension and the GitHub repo and do not condone breaking Instagram’s Terms of Service by accessing the private API endpoints mentioned in this article.