Facebook quietly deprecated their Python/Ruby libraries for Instagram API | Hacker News Reader

Facebook quietly deprecated their Python/Ruby libraries for Instagram API

github.com

66 pointstksohishi29 comments

Instagram is by far one of the easier APIs to use (among the social media services)...I've never used a client library for it, in Python nor Ruby.

In Ruby, the best API wrappers (or at least, the ones I used back in the day) for Twitter and Facebook are maintained independently:

https://github.com/sferik/twitter

https://github.com/arsduo/koala

The koala gem for Facebook is a godsend...the FB API and models are not trivial...and that's before trying to keep up with the many and frequent changes to the API spec. It's hard to imagine that FB would put the resources into continually maintaining that gem if it were an official gem...not when (I assume) so many more of their API consumers use iOS/JS/Android.

As a user of the gem I can say it was effectively deprecated over a year ago. I ended up just writing my own requests to do what I needed to do.

But at least they now give you a notice. :)

And the API end points are well-documented so it's not a big deal.

I wanted to do something with the Instagram API few weeks ago and it kinda surprised me how restrictive it is. You cannot do nearly anything without authentication and everything else is restricted by the TOS.

Most sites build their anti-DDoS logic around per-user rate limits. This requires them to force all API requests—even ones for completely public data—through a user session, to give those requests a context to be rate-limited by.

Allowing 'anonymous, public' APIs either requires that you rate-limit either too conservatively (e.g. by client ID—so clients with more users hit rate limits) or too liberally (e.g. by IP—so truly malicious clients can just hit you with a botnet.)

The only good way to provide a registration-less public API boils down to pairing—effectively "registering the machine" by handing it a token, and then relying on supercookies or frequently-revalidated 2FA tokens to persist the session. But this only works if you can reasonably expect a person to only want to query your API from one device at a time. If there are real use-cases for which your clients will want to hit you from random new machines (e.g. CoreOS's hosted etcd) then pairing won't help you.

As far as I know that seems to mimic the site itself, you can't do very much without being signed in.

I'm not happy about the restrictiveness either. (Especially the new Sandbox rate limitations)

Me neither but it seems like it's Instagram's attempt to stop the spammers.

Unfortunately, I have not seen a significant decrease in Instagram spam since the changes. So the changes just hurt legitimate developers.

Ruby one: https://github.com/facebookarchive/instagram-ruby-gem

Because they are shallow layers over their REST API? There's nothing useful in there anyway.

I'm surprised this hasn't been trivialized/automated away yet (or has it?) Some sort of language-neutral REST-protocol description language, that could be used to code-generate client libraries and also generate a test spec and documentation. Or maybe just a standard for media-types in HATEOS response types in specifying REST API "roots", to make them machine-discoverable, in a way where the result could be "cached into" a client-library.

This is a shameless plug, so I'll take my beating if it's appropriate. For the last few months, I've been working on a Python library, beekeeper, that's all about that. It essentially consumes a JSON description file that gives all the specs for an API, as well as information about its object structure, and then provides an intuitive, native-Python interface, typically with little to no additional code required.

You can check it out on GitHub at https://github.com/haikuginger/beekeeper, read more at http://beekeeper.rtfd.org, or just install it with pip.

I'm biased, but I think it's pretty cool.

I believe the current most popular flavor is Swagger ( http://swagger.io ) at the moment.

Despite having such quirks as: no Null support =|

IME, especially building APIs for mobile apps: nulls suck anyway!

Yeah, but nonetheless, are sometimes necessary. The suggested way is to just remove the field entirely, which is really a different sort of null.

Also, generic mapping types are second class citizens, id est just wanting to specify string -> string

I appreciate your point of view, but mine is different. For example, at Trulia, with a dozen different apps with millions of users and rich data in the app, there is a "no nulls" policy. It's just a convention: build sparse data structures instead of passing nulls.

So messing around with Python and rest APIs... Often a wrapper library for an API exists on github.. But why use it? If I use 6 APIs in my project I now just added 6 libraries that all do things like auth, connection pooling, error handling a little bit different. Meh. The actual work of code to json to API to json to code is simple (1 line usually), I would rather just learn the API and do it myself. You still need to learn the API to use the wrapper library...

Sounds like the soap protocol. I've had to deal with it recently at work and paired with the suds python library auto generates the api for you

Sounds suspiciously like SOAP to me.

I could maybe see something like http://unirest.io or, to a lesser extent, http://swagger.io making sense.

Have you tried using Swagger-Codegen (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen) to generate API clients, documentation (markdown) and test spec?

Disclosure: I'm a top contributor to Swagger-Codegen

I believe this is what AWS does to create all their libraries in the bazillion languages they support.

Honestly, unless the API is complex, why bother?

I feel like abstracting APIs into objects (essentially RPC calls?) creates too much of a dependency on the network. The friction of writing the calls and their handlers helps minimize their use :)

Mainly because I code microservices in at least five languages, and want to be able to touch all the same third-parties from any given one of them.

A good client library should abstract away the rate limiting, at least.

That is, it should keep track of how many requests you made over time, and if making another will put you over the rate limit, the library should block for however much time is needed before actually sending the request.

For example, I can't imagine interacting with Reddit's API without praw taking care of the rate limiting for me.

Enterprise clients (the ones they care about) are likely making requests from multiple machines, meaning you have to track API usage per token in a database somewhere.

So what is consensus on client libraries like this? Personally, I'd rather just use my own calls. Aren't most RESTful APIs simple enough not to need such libraries? And if they're not, it's a design failure?

But then you have companies like Braintree that only supports its libraries?

This is the best looking fork that I could find, I haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/Aeon/instagram-ruby-gem I hope Facebook gives write access to a volunteer to merge some of these pull requests. I wonder if the whole API is slowly on the path to deprecation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com