Edit August 2021: The last major open source Instagram bot was shut down in April 2020, since they used the Instagram API(which was detectable). Outsourcing to manual people in other countries also doesn’t work, since Instargam admitted in a security blog in 2017 that they keep a history of the network vs. account. This is why schools, with hundreds per IP, never get blocked, but new proxies or outsourced manual interaction instantly does. This tutorial is left for educational purposes, since it works to learn how to setup quick cloud servers. Cheat Layer, built by me, now enables automating all websites and programs:
No coding experience necessary. This guide shows you how to automate instagram likes, follows, and comments across 25 accounts for free in minutes. You can use this for easy guerrilla marketing, growing your small business from cold start on auto-pilot, or for spreading any other message. I’ve combined all the best bots you can build here to grow up to 50–200 followers per day.
I’ve included three bots. Instabot.py and Instabot you build yourself, so it’s a bit more complicated, but you learn how to easily use cloud servers to run bots. Instoo.com is an easier to use chrome extension installed in your browser with a graphical UI.
Step-by-Step instructions:
1. Setup Google Cloud Account
Head on over to Google Cloud, and sign up for a trial account. You get $300 free for a year for every new account. You can delete the account anytime to avoid being charged after a year. Click on the menu, and navigate to Compute Engine and VM instances
2. Create Cloud Instance
Click “Create Instance,” which is a server in the cloud, and fill out the details like in the image below.
Micro instance, .6gb memory, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS are the important settings. This will deduct $5 from your trial every month.
3. Connect To Instance
Once the instance status is green in the dashboard, click “ssh”.
This will open a new window like below that connects to the server:
This is what’s called a Linux shell in a server, but don’t worry it’s not hard to use. This is just like your Windows or Mac PC at home, but more functional for coding in the cloud(you can even make look like Windows if you wanted to).
4. Install Instabot
First, install the bot by typing this into the Linux shell window, or pasting it in(CTRL+V)(wget plus that URL is all one line):
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt
sudo python3 -m pip install instabot-py
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohanarun/instabot.py/master/example.py
Press enter after you paste in the last line.
5. Run the bot!
Finally, run the bot using the command below, but replace USERNAME , PASSWORD, and PROXY with your real Instagram username, password, and the proxy you got in the last step. Don’t include the “http://” in the proxy address, but do include the username and password.
python3 example.py USERNAME PASSWORD PROXY
The bot will start automating. Once you confirm it logs in and works, close it so you can edit the settings.
6. Edit Settings
Next edit example.py by pasting in the line below:
sudo nano example.pyThis will open the example.py file for editing in the terminal(keyboard only, no mouse). Don’t change the username, password, or proxy parameters. Keep the comas, quotations, and other punctuation where it is, and just edit the setting like they’re originally formatted. Avoid changing the frequency of things, as these are determined empirically to avoid instagram bans.
When you’re done, hold “ctrl + x” to exit, and hit “y” to accept changes, then “y” again to save changes under the same file name. You can see what’s going on with saving/exiting at the bottom of the screen in the nano text editor. After you’re done, re-run the bot using this command again:
python3 example.py USERNAME PASSWORD PROXYInstabot
Instabot is an open source bot that underpins many commercial bots you find online. These style of bots are now getting detected by instagram, but they still work for some users with high trust levels. This bot emulates a phone, so it also allows auto-welcome messages and scheduled posts, but browser emulation works better now for auto-liking/following.
Instabot Step-by-Step instructions:
1. Setup Google Cloud Account
Head on over to Google Cloud, and sign up for a trial account. You get $300 free for a year for every new account. You can delete the account anytime to avoid being charged after a year. Click on the menu, and navigate to Compute Engine and VM instances
2. Create Cloud Instance
Click “Create Instance,” which is a server in the cloud, and fill out the details like in the image below.
Micro instance, .6gb memory, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS are the important settings. This will deduct $5 from your trial every month.
3. Connect To Instance
Once the instance status is green in the dashboard, click “ssh”.
This will open a new window like below that connects to the server:
This is what’s called a Linux shell in a server, but don’t worry it’s not hard to use. This is just like your Windows or Mac PC at home, but more functional for coding in the cloud(you can even make look like Windows if you wanted to).
4. Install Instabot
First, install the python pip package installer by typing this into the Linux shell window, or pasting it in(CTRL+V):
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python-pip -y && sudo apt-get install git -y
You can install and download the bot by pasting the code lines below into the Linux Shell window. This will grab open source code from Github.com to install your bot. You can copy+paste all the lines at once, or type it into the window line-by-line, and just wait 2 minutes for it to finish installing. Hold CTRL+V to paste it in the Google cloud Linux shell window.
pip install -U instabot
git clone https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot --recursive
cd instabot/examples
Press enter after you paste in the last line.
5. Run the bot!
You can run up to two bots per proxy. The examples folder has many different kinds of bots you can run, and I’ll explain how to use one of them here. Type “ls” in the Linux shell window to see all of them.
Create a brand new Instagram account to test the bot works and does what you want first. Just paste the line below into the window(replace USERNAME, PASSWORD, and PROXY_ADDRESS to your login info and the proxy you got) and watch your little bot go :) :
python like_user_followers.py -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD dogsofinstagramThis script likes photos from all the followers of the “dogsofinstagram” account. You can change the last parameter to any account to do the same. There are many different scripts to automate different things like welcome_messages when people follow you. Feel free to ask how they work.
You’ll see it start to follow/like/comment like below!
The next bot is easier to use with buttons, and runs in your home browser so it always looks like a regular instagram user.
Instoo Google Chrome Extension
Instoo uses browser emulation to run a bot in your browser, so it always looks like a user on your home network without needing proxies. This bot doesn’t require your login details in like other services, because it automates your logged in account at instagram.com from the extension.
Instoo Step-by-step Instructions
1. Download Extension
Download the Instoo Google chrome extension at instoo.com
2. Open Extension
Click the little circular icon in your chrome browser to open the bot:
This will open the startup screen like below. Either open a new Instagram tab or go to the one it refreshes.
Once the Instagram tab finishes loading, log in to your account. If you’re already logged in, just switch back to the extension tab.
3. Setup Targeting
Add hashtags and accounts which are most relevant to your brand or niche. Don’t worry you can change them later.
4. Set Automation Speed
If you’re a new or small account, keep things to under 400 per day. Instagram won’t detect you as a suspicious bot, but they still have usage limits for ALL users even regular people just clicking on the browser. If you have ever encountered this throttling, you know it goes away after a day. You still keep using Instagram like normal, but your likes/follows will stop registering after a certain number per day(400 for new accounts).
You can increase this limit by about 20 per week safely. The highest limit you can reach is 1000/day.
5. Run the bot!
You can now easily start automation by switching the follow/unfollow/likes switches to green:
You’ll start to see the progress almost immediately:
That’s it! You can leave the bot running forever and you won’t get banned. You still have to leave your browser and PC running, but this is much safer than giving your password to a website or getting flagged by instagram for using them.
Best Practices
You just built an Instagram bot in a cloud server using open source software!
You can stop here, or go further with some tricks. Instagram bans these bots if use the same IP for many bots, or do too much at once. You can grow a bot farm to thousands using proxies…. After a year, or when you’re done, simply stop and delete the instances in the Google cloud console.
Use these tricks to get the most of it:
- Age: Older/larger accounts can increase their automation speed to 1000+/day. Accounts under 21 days old without phone verification have a low bar to get detected. Accounts over 2–6 months old almost never get caught unless they blatantly violate the TOS.
- Links: Avoid identical links in your bio across multiple accounts. It gets flagged as spam. If you must link to the same site, use different domains that re-direct.
- Proxies: Instagram proxies make your bot look like regular Instagram users, rather than a google cloud server IP address, by routing your traffic through servers around the world. Don’t run more than 2 bots per proxy(because Instagram detects them all at once). You can grow bot farms to the thousands using proxies for on google cloud. Instproxies has the cheapest Instagram proxies I can find, and their customer support is great.
- Bot Farms: Each bot can send hundreds of people per day back to your business. If you use many bots, you multiply that traffic across different target audiences. This effect compounds over time as users follow and like your photos, and spreads even farther.
- Settings: Slow bots are less likely to get banned. Keep things to under 400/day. Don’t auto-comment. This is less effective than likes. Liking content makes it hard to detect bots, since anyone could like at any time, and people end up following you back or checking out your profile. After you’ve grown your account for a few months to look like a regular Instagram, it becomes impossible to detect. This is also true for “grandfathered” accounts that are old. You can also buy PVA(phone verified) aged accounts online, but I can’t recommend any since they’re all sketchy.
- Mentions: Create “satellite” accounts to avoid Instagram bans, and create a network in various side-niches that forward traffic to your main account through mentions “@main_account_to_mention”. You can grow a bot network of thousands of accounts that each grow in different crowds and feed traffic to your main account, all for nearly free on auto-pilot.
- A/B Testing Your Bot: You can optimize your bot for optimal growth by A/B testing different hashtags, comments, user targets, and content. Setup a test by changing one thing in your bot per week, and measure the engagement on Instagram. Avoid changing multiple things, which is called multivariate testing, because it only works well if you have a lot of traffic like facebook or google. If you improve engagement, keep the change. If you don’t, go back and try another change. Over many iterations of these micro-improvements, you can optimize your bots and Instagram accounts to grow thousands of followers per week. Through A/B testing you can grow your revenue even faster over time.
How you use this is up to you. You can populate the accounts with photos before you start botting to spread a message or grow followers for a brand. You can also grow “satellite” Instagrams that mention your main ones to feed traffic and followers to it, and the satellites can be in varied specific niches to test your ad targeting.
Follow me on Medium for more neat tutorials. Good luck, and feel free to ask questions! I always respond.
