Instructables DIY Project and Tutorial Scraper
Pricing
Pay per event
Instructables DIY Project and Tutorial Scraper
Scrape Instructables.com project metadata across all craft verticals including electronics, woodworking, sewing, cooking, and 3D printing. Returns title, author, category, difficulty, step count, materials summary, favorites, views, and comments counts per project.
Pricing
Pay per event
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2
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1
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24 days ago
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Scrapes project metadata from Instructables.com — the canonical maker-tutorial index covering electronics, woodworking, 3D printing, sewing, cooking, and everything in between.
Returns one record per project. No step body text, no downloadable files — just metadata. Title, author, category, difficulty, step count, materials list, favorites, views, comments. The stuff you actually need to analyze or index a project corpus.
The site has 370k+ published projects across eight categories. The scraper covers all of them, with an optional category filter and sort order.
What You Get
| Field | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
project_id | string | URL slug (e.g. DIY-Wooden-Bookshelf) |
title | string | Project title |
author_username | string | Instructables screen name |
author_url | string | Author profile URL |
category | string | Top-level category (circuits, workshop, craft, cooking, living, outside, design) |
channel | string | Sub-category (e.g. arduino, woodworking, knitting-and-crochet) |
difficulty | string | Project type (e.g. "Step by Step") |
step_count | integer | Number of steps |
materials_summary | string[] | Materials/supplies list |
favorites_count | integer | Community favorites |
views_count | integer | Total views |
comments_count | integer | Comment count |
is_featured | boolean | Editor-featured project |
contest_entered | string | Contest name if the project was entered |
published_at | string | Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD) |
thumbnail_url | string | Cover image URL |
project_url | string | Full project URL |
Input
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
maxItems | integer | 10 | Maximum projects to return. Leave empty for no limit. |
category | string | (all) | Filter by category: circuits, workshop, craft, cooking, living, outside, design, teachers. |
sortBy | string | Newest | Sort order: Newest, Views, or Favorites. |
Usage
Broad corpus export
Leave category empty. Set sortBy: Newest and a high maxItems to pull a recent cross-craft sample. The corpus spans electronics through woodworking to cooking — broad enough for most content intelligence or dataset use cases.
Focused category pull
Set category: circuits and sortBy: Views to get the most-viewed electronics projects. Same for workshop, craft, etc. The category filter maps to Instructables' top-level taxonomy.
Dataset research
Run with maxItems: 5 to preview the field shape before committing to a full corpus pull. The output is consistent across categories.
How It Works
The scraper calls Instructables' internal Typesense search API (/api_proxy/search) — the same endpoint their front-end uses for project listing pages. For each project, it also calls /json-api/showInstructableModel to retrieve step count, materials, and difficulty. No browser required.
The Typesense API key is a scoped key embedded in the page context at startup. The scraper fetches it once at run start and reuses it for all listing requests.
Limits and Notes
- Robots.txt crawl delay: 1 second. The scraper paces itself accordingly.
- Rate limits: Instructables does not publish official rate limits. The scraper is conservative by default.
- Materials: Some projects have empty supplies sections — that's the site content, not a scraper issue.
materials_summaryreturns an empty array in those cases. - Copyright: This scraper returns metadata only. Step-by-step instructional text and downloadable files are creator-owned — they are intentionally excluded.
Pricing
Pay-per-result via OrbTop PPE. Standard profile: $0.10/start + $0.001/project at free tier.
Built by OrbTop.
