basketcase 7.0.0

Download images and videos from Instagram

BasketCase

Download images and videos from Instagram.

Notable features:

• Stories can be downloaded without triggering the "seen" flag.
• Downloads a high quality version of a profile picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTGr5t3MoY ;)

Requirements

• Python 3.8^

Installation

Install it from PyPI as a user install.

pip install --user basketcase

This should put the executable basketcase on your PATH.

Alternatively, you could install it in a virtual environment. I keep mine at ~/venv, and I have a shell alias to quickly activate it.

Also, a pre-built executable for Linux is provided with the releases.

Command-line usage

basketcase -u "https://instagram.com/p/<post_id>"

Downloaded resources will be stored in the current working directory (i.e. $PWD/basketcase_downloads).

To download from multiple URLs, create a text file (e.g. urls.txt) and populate it with resource URLs:

https://instagram.com/p/<post_id>
https://instagram.com/reel/<reel_id>
https://instagram.com/<username>

basketcase -f ./urls.txt

See --help for more info.

Supported URLs

Supported URL	Description
https://instagram.com/<username>	User profile. Downloads stories from the past 24 hours, and the profile picture.
https://instagram.com/p/<post_id>	Standard publication.
https://instagram.com/reel/<reel_id>	Reels movie
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/<highlight_id>/	A collection of stories, or "highlights"
https://www.instagram.com/s/<random_characters>	A shorter type of URL

Authentication

1. Add a session cookie

basketcase --cookie <session_cookie_id> --cookie-name "my session"
# Added session id: 1

2. Specify its identifier when downloading

basketcase -s 1

List all available sessions with basketcase -l. To disable sessions, use --no-session. If only one exists, it is treated as the default.

User data

Cookies and other application data are kept in your home directory (i.e. ~/.basketcase).

Development setup

See Packaging Python Projects.

1. cd to the project root and create a virtual environment in a directory named venv, which is conveniently ignored in version control.
2. Install the dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Install this package in editable mode.

pip install -e .

Package build and upload

1. Update the requirements list.

pip freeze --exclude-editable > requirements.txt

2. Increment the version on pyproject.toml.
3. Build the package.

python -m build

4. Commit and push the changes (and a new version tag) to the git repository.
5. Publish it.

python -m twine upload dist/*

Build an executable

With the zipapp module we can build the whole package as an executable file for Linux. The only runtime requirement is Python 3.

python -m zipapp ./basketcase \
    --main="basketcase.__main__:main" \
    --python="/usr/bin/env python3" \
    --output="basketcase" \
    --compress

Explanation:

• In zipapp ./basketcase, the argument is the path to the project folder
• --main="basketcase.__main__:main" is the package entrypoint script, as defined in pyproject.toml