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Laravel Instagram Feed

Easily include your Instagram feed(s) in your project.

The aim of this package is to make it as simple and user-friendly as possible to include your Instagram feed in your project, using Instagram's Basic Display API. The package stores the feed in your cache, and provides you with the ability to refresh your feeds on whatever schedule suits you.

Note This package requires PHP 8. If that is not your cup of tea, then you may continue to use v2.

Installation

Note If you are upgrading from v2.*, refer to the upgrade guide, as there are breaking changes. Also Note This version requires PHP 8 and up, so if you are still on PHP 7 and don't specify a version when you install, composer will pull in ^v2, in which case you should be reading this page.

Tutorial

Some parts of this whole thing can be a bit confusing, especially if you are not familiar with following the OAuth flow. I have included a tutorial to try help make things a bit more clear. Feedback or improvements on this would be most appreciated.

Before you start

To use the Instagram Basic Display API, you will need to have a Facebook app set up with the correct permissions, etc. If you don't have this yet, head over to the Facebook developer docs and follow the instructions.

How Instagram Media is Handled

Instagram provides three media types through this API: image, video and carousel. This package simplifies that into just a feed of images and videos. You may use the ignore_video config option if you don't want to include any videos. For carousel items, the first item of the carousel is used. If video is to be ignored, and the first image will be used, if it exists. Carousel items have a children property, which includes the actual carousel items.

Note on ignoring video

If you chose to ignore video, your feed size may be smaller than the limit you requested. If you expect to be ignoring video posts you may want to increase how many posts you fetch (see "Getting the Feed" below).

Setup

php artisan vendor:publish to publish the necessary migrations and config, and php artisan migrate to run migrations.

Config

Publishing the vendor assets as described above will give you a config/instagram-feed.php file. You will need to add your config before you can get started. The comments in the file explain each of the settings.

Profiles

This package provides a GNAHotelSolutions\InstagramFeed\Profile model which corresponds to an Instagram profile/account. You will need to create a profile for each feed you intend to use in your app/site. Once a profile has been created, you will need to authorize the profile before you can fetch its feed.

Creating profiles

You may create profiles programmatically in your code as follows. All you need is to provide a unique username for the profile. This does not have to match an Instagram username, it can be any name you wish to use to refer to the profile.

Having just a single profile for a project is a fairly common use case, so this package includes an artisan command to quickly create a profile, so that you don't need to build out the necessary UI for your users to do so. Running php artisan instagram-feed:profile {username} will create a profile with that username, that you may then use as desired.

Getting Authorized

Once you have a profile, you may call the getInstagramAuthUrl() method on it to get a link to present to the user that will give authentication. When the user visits that url they can then grant access to your app (or not). If everything goes smoothly, the user will be redirected back to the success_redirect_to route you set in your config file. If access is not granted, you will be redirected to the failure_redirect_to route you configured.

If you have not set your client_id and/or client_secret correctly, or your Instagram app does not accept the user, Instagram won't redirect at all, and your user will see an error from Instagram.

Refreshing access tokens

The long lived access tokens for the API expire after 60 days. This package includes an artisan command that will handle this for you, you just need to ensure that it runs at least once every 60 days. The command is php artisan instagram-feed:refresh-tokens

Getting the feed

Once your profile has been authenticated, you can retrieve the feed either directly from the InstagramFeed class, or by first getting the profile and calling the feed method on it.

or

Once the feed is fetched, it will be cached forever and the same cached results will be returned until you refresh the feed. Normally this is done is a scheduled chron job.

Limiting the number of items in the feed

By default, the number of items in the feed is 20. You may pass an optional integer parameter when getting your feed, as such: \GNAHotelSolutions\InstagramFeed\InstagramFeed::for('my profile', 15) or $profile?->feed(15) to limit the feed to that amount.

Fetching all posts (no limit)

If you want to fetch all your posts (up to the last 1000), you may pass null as the limit parameter to your refreshFeed or feed method. The package will make multiple requests to fetch all your previous posts up to 1000. You may then use the timestamp on the posts to sort, paginate, etc.

Setting limits, and cache

When the feed is being supplied from the cache, the limit will have no affect. If you would like to change the limit to what you previously used, you will have to refresh the feed.

Setting limits and ignore_video

If you chose to ignore video, your feed size may be smaller than the limit you requested. If you expect to be ignoring video posts you may want to increase how many posts you fetch.

Updating the feed

You may refresh the feed similar to how you fetch the reed:

or

Refreshing the feed returns an instance of InstagramFeed, however, unlike getting the normal feed, this method can throw an exception if an error occurs. The idea is that you refresh your feeds in the background somewhere, usually in a scheduled job. This package includes an artisan command php artisan instagram-feed:refresh, that will refresh all authorised profiles, and handle errors if they occur. If you have an email address set in the config, that address will be notified in the case of an error. It is recommended to use Laravel's scheduling features to run this command as frequently as you see fit.

Using the feed

Once you have a feed, you may send it to your view, where it may be iterated over, with each item in the feed being an instance of the InstagramMedia class.

If you would like more control over the feed's items, you may call the collect method on the feed to retrieve the feed items as a Laravel Collection.

Feed items

Each feed item is an instance of the InstagramMedia class and provides the following properties and methods: