Does Instagram Reels have an API for developers?

Naa,

Instagram doesn’t provide any API for Reels yet, since the reel feature is still not available in many countries but this going to be available soon.

So the question arises here, how we can get the reels data via API?

Well, the answer is you can’t But! if you are in favour to do so some scraping thing then the answer is definitely Yes!

But How?

We all know scraping has lots of efforts, due to things get changed very frequent. and if you don’t care about those below are sample PHP script to fetch reels data in JSON.

<?php

//!IMPORTANT
$sessionid = ["Cookie: sessionid=YOUR SESSION ID HERE"];

// REELS SHORT CODE FROM URL
$shortcode = null;

$response = [];

/**
 * Get a web file (HTML, XHTML, XML, image, etc.) from a URL.  Return an
 * array containing the HTTP server response header fields and content.
 */
function get_web_page($url)
{
    $user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0';
    $options    = array(
        CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST  => "GET",        //set request type post or get                            
        CURLOPT_POST           => false,        //set to GET    
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => $user_agent,  //set user agent                                    
        # CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE   => "cookie.txt", //set cookie file                                     
        # CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR    => "cookie.txt", //set cookie jar                                     
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => $sessionid,   // sending manually set cookie                                   
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,         // return web page                                
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,        // don't return headers                                
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,         // follow redirects                                
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",           // handle all encodings                            
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,         // set referer on redirect                                
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,          // timeout on connect                            
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,          // timeout on response                            
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,           // stop after 10 redirects                            
    );
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
    $content = curl_exec($ch);
    $err     = curl_errno($ch);
    $errmsg  = curl_error($ch);
    $header  = curl_getinfo($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    $header['errno']   = $err;
    $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
    $header['content'] = $content;
    return $header;
}

if ((isset($_GET['q'])) && !empty($_GET['q'])) {

    $shortcode = $_GET['q'];
    $reels_url = "https://www.instagram.com/p/$shortcode/?__a=1";

    // read a web page and check for errors:
    $result = get_web_page($reels_url);

    if ($result['errno'] != 0) {
        $response = json_encode(['error' => "bad url, timeout, redirect loop"]);
    }

    if ($result['http_code'] != 200) {
        $response = json_encode(['error' => "no page, no permissions, no service"]);
    }
    
    if ($result['http_code'] === 200) {
        $response = $result['content'];
    }

}

// JSON OUTPUT OR ERROR HERE
header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo $response;

How to use this PHP script?

Save the above script in a PHP file e.g. fetch-reels.php and run it like
http://localhost/fetch-reels.php?q={SHORT-CODE}

Reels URL e.g.

1. https://www.instagram.com/p/COlKxQLAM11
2. https://www.instagram.com/reel/COlKxQLAM11/?igshid=12f6j9a1dfx2x