How to get JSON from Instagram API on TransIp web server?

Question

I'm using this code for getting images from Instagram account:

<?php
$response = file_get_contents('https://www.instagram.com/fcbarcelona/?__a=1');

$response = json_decode($response, TRUE);

foreach($response['graphql']['user']['edge_owner_to_timeline_media']['edges'] as $img) {
    ?>
    <div class="sbi_item sbi_type_image sbi_new sbi_transition" id="sbi_1231046275994525759_3147458623" data-date="1460972173">
        <div class="sbi_photo_wrap">
            <img src="<?php echo $img['node']['display_url']; ?>">
        </div>
    </div>
    <?php
}
?>

On my Wamp server everything works fine! But when I upload my code to my website server from TransIp I can not receive the JSON from Instagram.

Is file_get_contents maybe not supported on my website server? How can I check it is? Is there another way to retrieve the JSON?

cURL way:

$url = "https://www.instagram.com/fcbarcelona/?__a=1";

//  Initiate curl
$ch = curl_init();
// Will return the response, if false it print the response
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Set the url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
// Execute
$result=curl_exec($ch);
// Closing
curl_close($ch);

// Will dump a beauty json :3
var_dump(json_decode($result, true));

`"Is file_get_contents maybe not supported on my website server?"` - that must be a question for the hosting tech support surely? Have you tried using `cURL` to fetch the reqest on your live host? — Professor Abronsius, Jul 07 '20 at 14:01
When dealing with SSL connections you often need to take extra steps to deal with the SSL negotiation. `file_get_contents` will accept a `context` argument which you can configure accordingly. The same is true with cURL - — Professor Abronsius, Jul 07 '20 at 14:19
@ProfessorAbronsius Do you have an example? The cURL code above I found on stack overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16700960/how-to-use-curl-to-get-json-data-and-decode-the-data) — Rob, Jul 07 '20 at 14:24

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 07 '20 at 14:28

The following worked OK locally - whether it'll work on your troublesome host or not is unknown. You'll need to download a copy of the latest cacert.pem - see the note in the function. Copy said cecert.pem to your server and edit the function to use that file.

<?php

    
    $url='https://www.instagram.com/fcbarcelona/?__a=1';
    $res=curl( $url );
    if( $res->info->http_code==200 ){
        printf( '<pre>%s</pre>', print_r( json_decode( $res->response ), true ) );
    }
    
    
    
    function curl( $url=NULL, $options=NULL, $headers=false ){
        /*
            Get a copy of `cecert.pem` from
            https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html
            
            store on webserver and then edit
            the path below as appropriate.
        */  
        $cacert='c:/wwwroot/cacert.pem';
        $vbh = fopen('php://temp', 'w+');
        
        /* Initialise curl request object */
        $curl=curl_init();
        if( parse_url( $url,PHP_URL_SCHEME )=='https' ){
            curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true );
            curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2 );
            curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO, $cacert );
            curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CAPATH, $cacert );
        }

        /* Define standard options */
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL,trim( $url ) );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, false );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20 );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60 );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.38 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.97 Safari/537.38' );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '' );
        
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_STDERR, $vbh );
        

        /* Assign runtime parameters as options */
        if( isset( $options ) && is_array( $options ) ){
            foreach( $options as $param => $value ) curl_setopt( $curl, $param, $value );
        }
        
        if( $headers && is_array( $headers ) ){
            curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers );
        }

        /* Execute the request and store responses */
        $res=(object)array(
            'response'  =>  curl_exec( $curl ),
            'info'      =>  (object)curl_getinfo( $curl ),
            'errors'    =>  curl_error( $curl )
        );
        rewind( $vbh );
        $res->verbose=stream_get_contents( $vbh );
        fclose( $vbh );
        curl_close( $curl );
        return $res;
    }
?>

Thanks! That works fine! Also, on my "troublesome " web host — Rob, Jul 07 '20 at 14:37

How to get JSON from Instagram API on TransIp web server?

1 Answers1