Note: Socket.io, as of v.0.7, supports native Channels. I suspect it'd be far more efficient to utilise these at some point in the future.

Introduction

This is intended as a platform to allow for the rapid development Instagram-fed real-time web applications.

See my blog post for some background on the project.

What does what

I find it rather easy to get lost when dealing with JavaScript on both the front- and back-ends. Throw the multi-threaded, asynchronous nature of Node.js and Socket.io, and things can get a little messy, so, here's a very basic overview of the architecture:

(Will expand on this later...)

• subscriptions.js - Socket server
• server.js - File server
• helpers/* - Subscription channel handlers

How can you help?

1. Front-end library
2. Geography and Location real-time handlers
3. Extend to include more static API methods (comments, likes, etc.)

Installation

You'll need to sign up for an Instagram API developer account and create a client before you do anything, go here:

http://instagr.am/developer/manage/

Install Node.js

curl -O http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.4.8.tar.gz
tar xvf node-v0.4.8.tar.gz
cd node-v0.4.8
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Install and run Redis

curl -O http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.2.1.tar.gz
tar xvf redis-2.2.1.tar.gz
cd redis-2.2.1
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

cd /your-app/
./redis-server conf/redis.conf

Install NPM (Node package manager)

curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Install required node libraries

cd /your-app/

sudo npm install redis
sudo npm install socket.io 
sudo npm install express
sudo npm install ejs
sudo npm install instagram-node-lib
sudo npm install geo

Add your client_id and client_secret to settings.js

./node server.js

Subscribe to your authenticated users' feeds

All other subscriptions are handled by the app code itself, but as this is a one-off, you may as well subscribe to it now.

curl -F 'client_id=CLIENT-ID' \
-F 'client_secret=CLIENT-SECRET' \
-F 'object=user' \
-F 'aspect=media' \
-F 'verify_token=userSubscription' \
-F 'callback_url=http://YOUR-CALLBACK/URL' \
https://api.instagram.com/v1/subscriptions/

Navigate to http://your-server:3000/