This project is not associated with Instagram or Meta in any way.

What is this?

VxInst is an open-source, blazing fast server that scrapes the direct URL to a video from instagram's CDN to fix embedding in apps like discord.

Tip

If you're looking for the public API stuff, go to the wiki

How can I use it?

Simply add vx to instagram URLs like so:

https://vxinst.com/...

This will attempt to embed the instagram video:

Tip

Clicking the VxInst URL will redirect you to the original post

Self-hosting

🍏 Mac and Linux 🐧

Click to show

You can either compile the binary from source or download a precompiled binary from the releases tab.

Compilation

# Clone the repository
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Reishimanfr/vxinst

# Cd into the directory
cd vxinst

# Compile the code
go build -ldflags "-s -w" -tags=jsoniter -o vxinsta

Check out the examples on how to run VxInst

🪟 Windows

Click to show

There are no precompiled binaries for windows meaning you'll need to compile the code from source.

# Clone the repository
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Reishimanfr/vxinst

# Cd into the directory
cd vxinst

# Compile the code
go build -ldflags "-s -w" -tags=jsoniter -o vxinst.exe

🐋 Docker

Click to show

# Copy the example docker-compose file
cp docker-compose.yml.example docker-compose.yml

# Edit the docker-compose file
vim docker-compose.yml

# Start the container
docker-compose up -d

⚙️ Configuration

The server can be configured using either command-line flags or environment variables. Flags take precedence over environment variables.

Flag	Environment Variable	Default	Description
--port	PORT	8080	Port to run the server on
--gin-logs	GIN_LOGS	false	Enable gin debug logs
--secure	SECURE	false	Use a secure connection
--log-level	LOG_LEVEL	info	Logging verbosity level [debug, error, warn, info]
--cert-file	CERT_FILE		Path to the SSL certificate (needed with secure mode)
--key-file	KEY_FILE		Path to the SSL key (needed with secure mode)
--sentry-dsn	SENTRY_DSN		Sentry DSN used for telemetry
--cache-lifetime	CACHE_LIFETIME	60	Time to keep cache for (in minutes)
--memory-lifetime	MEMORY_LIFETIME	7	Time to keep memory cache for (in days)
--redis-enable	REDIS_ENABLE	false	Enables redis for caching (memory if set to false)
--redis-address	REDIS_ADDR		Address to redis database
--redis-passwd	REDIS_PASSWD		Password for redis database
--redis-db	REDIS_DB	-1	Redis database to use
--proxies	PROXIES		Proxies to make request with. Provide multiple to cycle
--proxy-scrape-html	PROXY_SCRAPE_HTML	false	Sets if proxies should scrape HTML. May use up bandwidth
--insta-cookie	INSTA_COOKIE		User cookie for API calls with for age restricted posts
--insta-xigappid	INSTA_XIGAPPID		X-IG-App-ID for API calls
--insta-browser-agent	INSTA_BROWSER_AGENT	*	<Firefox, Linux, X11>

* = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:135.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/135.0

📚 Examples on running VxInst

Run on the default port with no TLS

./vxinst

Run with TLS enabled, a proxy attached, redis for cache and instagram credentials (recommended)

./vxinst \
        --secure
        --cert-file="/path/to/your/ssl/certificate"
        --key=file="/path/to/your/ssl/key"
        --proxies="http://yourproxyiphere:someport"
        --redis-enable
        --redis-address="127.0.0.1:6379"
        --redis-passwd="my_very_safe_password"
        --redis-db=0
        --insta-cookie="your instagram cookie here"
        --insta-xigappid="x-ig-app-id here"

📋 Task list

• Find a way to fix some reels not embedding
• Add Open Graph embeds to videos
• Add additional info (like the amount of likes) to the Open Graph embed
• Add monitoring dashboard capabilities
• Create deployment scripts (for docker and some services)
• Create an action to automatically compile the binary and release it
• Fix reels with usernames at the beginning not working (/:username/reel/:postId)