Instabridge - Building an Instagram to Telegram Bot

Introduction

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My Telegram group shares Instagram links constantly. Every time someone posts one, everyone has to leave Telegram, open Instagram, watch the reel, come back. Annoying enough that I decided to fix it.

Bots that do that already exist. I didn’t use them. A bot sitting in your group chat reads every message sent in it. I’m not interested in handling that to code I didn’t write and can’t read. So I built my own.

How It Works

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The flow is straightforward:

1. A message arrive in the group containing an Instagram URL
2. The bot extracts the URL using a regex pattern
3. It attempts to download the media via yt-dlp
4. If the post is a photo, it falls back to instaloader
5. The file gets uploaded directly to the chat

Everything else in the code handles the edge cases around those five steps.

The Stack

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Project Structure

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tg-instagram-bot/
├── main.py
├── Dockerfile
├── requirements.txt
├── .env.example
├── .env
├── .gitignore
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

Setup

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1. Create a Telegram Bot

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1. Message @BotFather on Telegram
2. Send /newbot and follow the prompts
3. Copy the bot token you receive

2. Disable Privacy Mode

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In BotFather send /setprivacy → select your bot → Disable. By default Telegram bots in groups only receive messages that start with /. Disabling privacy mode lets the bot read all messages so it can detect Instagram URLs anywhere in the chat.

3. Install Dependencies

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python3 -m venv .venv
./.venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Configure Secrets

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cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and fill in your values:

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_token_here
INSTAGRAM_COOKIES_FILE=/path/to/cookies.txt
ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS=-1001234567890

5. Run

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python main.py

Self-Hosting

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To run the bot persistently on a server:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3 python3-pip -y

git clone https://github.com/GreyCipher-sec/tg-instagram-bot.git
cd tg-instagram-bot

python3 -m venv .venv
./.venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

cp .env.example .env
nano .env

Create the systemd service:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/instabot.service

[Unit]
Description=Instagram Telegram Bot
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/user/tg-instagram-bot
ExecStart=/home/user/tg-instagram-bot/.venv/bin/python main.py
EnvironmentFile=/home/user/tg-instagram-bot/.env
Restart=always
User=user

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

ExecStart must point to the virtualenv’s Python binary, not the system one. Using the system Python means your installed dependencies are not visible to the service.

Enable and start it:

sudo systemctl enable instabot
sudo systemctl start instabot
sudo systemctl status instabot

Monitor live logs:

journalctl -u instabot -f

Docker Deploy

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The repo includes a Dockerfile as an alternative to the systemd setup. It runs the bot as a non-root user (botuser) inside a python:3.12-slim container.

Build the image:

docker build -t instabot .

Run it with your .env file passed in:

docker run -d --name instabot --env-file .env instabot

The -d flag runs the container in the background. To check it is running and watch live logs:

docker ps
docker logs -f instabot

To stop and remove it:

docker stop instabot && docker rm instabot

Make sure your .env file is filled in before running the container, the bot will fail to start without a valid TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN.

Docker is the cleaner option if you already have it on your server and want to avoid managing a virtualenv and systemd unit manually. Both approaches work, pick whichever fits your setup.

Instagram Cookies (Private Posts & Rate Limiting)

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By default the bot only downloads public posts. For private posts from accounts your Instagram account follows, or to reduce the chance of rate limiting, provide a cookies file:

1. Install the “Get cookies.txt LOCALLY” browser extension
2. Log in to Instagram in your browser
3. Export cookies to a file
4. Set the path in .env:

INSTAGRAM_COOKIES_FILE=/path/to/instagram_cookies.txt

The authenticated account must follow the private profile for private post downloads to work.

Implementation

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Detecting Instagram URLs

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INSTAGRAM_URL_PATTERN = re.compile(
    r"https?://(?:www\.)?instagram\.com/"
    r"(?:p|reel|reels|tv|stories)/[A-Za-z0-9_\-]+/?(?:\?[^\s]*)?"
)

def find_instagram_urls(text: str) -> list[str]:
    return INSTAGRAM_URL_PATTERN.findall(text)

The pattern covers posts (/p/), reels and stories. Any matching URLs in the message get extracted and processed in order.

Downloading Media

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yt-dlp handles videos and reels. For photo posts it explicitly raises:

ExtractorError: There is no video in this post

That error gets caught and routed to instaloader instead:

def download_media(url: str, output_dir: str) -> list[Path]:
    try:
        with yt_dlp.YoutubeDL(build_ydl_options(output_dir)) as ydl:
            info = ydl.extract_info(url, download=True)
            entries = info.get("entries") or [info]
            paths = [resolve_file_path(ydl, entry) for entry in entries if entry]
            return [p for p in paths if p is not None]
    except Exception as exc:
        if not is_photo_post_error(exc):
            raise

        logger.info("Photo post detected, falling back to instaloader")
        return download_images(url, output_dir)

Secret Management

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Credentials live in a .env file, loaded at runtime by python-dotenv:

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_token_here
INSTAGRAM_COOKIES_FILE=/path/to/cookies.txt
ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS=-1001234567890

What Broke

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Python version conflicts

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Running Python 3.14 locally. python-telegram-bot calls asyncio.get_event_loop() which changed behaviour in 3.14 and raises:

RuntimeError: There is no current event loop in thread 'MainThread'.

Fix:

asyncio.set_event_loop(asyncio.new_event_loop())

Called once in main() before building the application.

yt-dlp can’t download photos

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yt-dlp is a video downloader. It raises an explicit error on photo posts rather than silently failing. The dix was catching that specific error string and routing to instaloader, which handles both photos and carousels properly.

Instagram blocks every scraping approach

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Before landing on instaloader, I tried two other approaches for photos:

HTML scraping: requests fetches the page, regex looks for image URLs. Instagram serves a JavaScript shell. No data in the HTML.

oEmbed API: instagram.com/oembed/?url=... should return JSON with a thumbnail URL. It redirects to the same JavaScript shell.

Every approach Instagram had already anticipated. instaloader is a library specifically built to maintain this fight, it handles authentication, rate limiting and API changes. The right call was using it rather than trying to out-engineer Meta’s platform team.

Notes

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• Private posts will fail regardless of cookies unless the authenticated account follows that profile. The bot returns a clean error message rather than crashing.
• yt-dlp breaks occasionally when Instagram changes its internals. pip install -U yt-dlp fixes it most of the time.
• Telegram bots are limited to 50MB per file via the Bot API. Anything larger gets a warning message instead.

The Code

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Full project on GitHub: GreyCipher-sec/tg-instagram-bot