ss251/instacrawl

instacrawl is a command line tool that lets you make a personal, offline backup of your own Instagram account. It archives your direct messages, posts, reels, stories, saved posts, and liked posts into a single searchable SQLite database that lives on your own computer, so you can search through years of your own content without needing an internet connection. It works by reusing the session from your logged in browser instead of asking for a username and password, similar to how some other download tools grab cookies from a browser you are already signed into. Once connected, running a sync command pulls down your messages and content along with any photos or videos, and a separate carve command can recover media whose links from Instagram's servers have already expired, using a local browser cache and no network access at all. The README is very direct about the legal and ethical boundaries of the tool. It only archives the account you are logged in as, not other people's data, and it openly states that automating requests like this may go against Instagram's terms of service, which could risk your account being rate limited or flagged. It explicitly avoids things like proxies or bypassing login checkpoints, and instead stops and hands control back to you if Instagram challenges the login. Everything stays local: no telemetry, no uploads, and secrets are stored in your operating system's keychain rather than in plain text files. It is built on top of a separate toolkit called crawlkit, which handles the underlying storage and search machinery, while instacrawl focuses on the Instagram specific parts. This tool suits technically comfortable users who want a personal archive of their own Instagram history and are willing to install a command line tool via Homebrew or by building it from source with Go. It is released under the MIT license.