zephyrwing-ai/ins-cli

ins-cli is a command-line tool that lets you interact with Instagram directly from your terminal, reading profile data and posts, and publishing content, without needing to use the Instagram website or a mobile app. It works through two approaches depending on what you want to do. For reading data (profiles, posts, comments, user search), it calls Instagram's internal web APIs directly. If those requests get blocked or rate-limited, it automatically falls back to driving a real, logged-in Google Chrome browser to fetch the data instead. For publishing content like photos or videos, it always uses browser automation, relying on the Instagram session cookies already saved in your Chrome profile. The project specifically requires the stable version of Chrome, not Chrome Canary. The available commands cover common Instagram tasks: logging in to save your cookies, searching for users, viewing profiles, listing recent posts, reading comments on a post, and publishing images or videos. Output can be displayed as a table, as JSON, or as plain text, making it easy to pipe results into other tools. Comment and story publishing are partially implemented but not yet fully stable. Installation is straightforward, once published to the Python package index, a single pip or uv command sets it up. It requires Python 3.10 or newer and a Chrome installation where you are already logged into Instagram. The README notes that Instagram's internal APIs change frequently, so the tool may need periodic updates to keep working. The project is MIT licensed.