feat: publish fetched media by rsync, and back off from the CDN's 429s

Wires up the staging -> rsync step and replaces --archives with --index
(a listing source: local path or the viewer's API), --staging and
--publish, so the fetch host needs no copy of the archive.

rsync runs --ignore-existing with no --delete. That is a safety property
rather than an optimisation: the archive deliberately outlives Instagram,
so publishing must only ever add. It runs once at the end so a profile
that fails midway never reaches the archive half-written.

Exercised end-to-end against withaseul across all four surfaces,
publishing to a scratch directory. Seeding worked as designed (915 of 984
post items and 28 of 34 reel items already held), stories and highlights
returned no results cleanly, and the collab-reel case landed correctly:
"withaseul - reels" holds files owned by cher_ryppo, 0ct0ber19 and
official_artms, each with the owner in the filename and the crawl scope
as the directory.

The first run drew '429 Too Many Requests' from the CDN at 3M with 1-3s
sleeps and lost two videos. That is the tolerant surface complaining, so
the defaults are now 1M, 6-10s between requests, 3-6s between downloads,
sleep-429 of 120s and 8 retries. Re-running recovered both videos with
zero failures and zero 429s. Installing yt-dlp on the fetch host also
matters: without it DASH videos fall back to a progressive URL, which is
what the rate limiting hit hardest.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-16 21:37:38 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 4fee8b1dfe
commit 3a34e4359e
2 changed files with 224 additions and 41 deletions
+170 -41
View File
@@ -6,16 +6,23 @@ The CLI replacement for the JDownloader2 workflow. See docs/gallery-dl.md for
the measurements behind every choice here — especially the safety model, which
is the reason this script exists in this shape rather than a simpler one.
STATUS: skeleton. The config generation and planning are complete and tested;
`--execute` is deliberately gated behind an explicit flag and has not been run
against the live archive.
STATUS: exercised end-to-end against `withaseul` (posts, reels, stories,
highlights) publishing to a scratch directory. It has never written to the live
archive.
The fetch host needs no copy of the archive. It stages locally and rsyncs
afterwards; what it already holds is learned from a *file listing* alone
(`--index`), which the viewer's own API serves.
Usage:
./scripts/gdl-sync.py --archives <dir> --profile 0ct0ber19 --dry-run
./scripts/gdl-sync.py --archives <dir> --all --dry-run
./scripts/gdl-sync.py --archives <dir> --profile 0ct0ber19 --execute
./scripts/gdl-sync.py --index https://instaarchive.ergosteur.com \\
--staging /var/tmp/gdl --publish user@host:/path/to/archives \\
--profile 0ct0ber19 --dry-run
Run it from the host whose public IP matches the browser the cookie came from.
# ...then swap --dry-run for --execute. --index also accepts a local path.
Run it from the host whose public IP matches the browser the cookie came from;
using the cookie from elsewhere is what session-hijack detection looks for.
"""
from __future__ import annotations
@@ -107,6 +114,59 @@ def scan_archives(root: Path) -> dict[str, Profile]:
return profiles
class ArchiveIndex:
"""
What the archive already holds, as filenames only.
Deliberately never reads file *contents*, so the fetch host does not need a
copy of the archive — it can stage locally and rsync afterwards. Backed
either by a local directory or by the viewer's own API, which already
serves exactly this listing and is the cheaper option when the archive
lives on network storage (a full walk there took ~52s).
"""
def __init__(self, source: str):
self.remote = source.startswith(("http://", "https://"))
self.source = source.rstrip("/") if self.remote else None
self.root = None if self.remote else Path(source)
if self.root and not self.root.is_dir():
raise SystemExit(f"archive index not found: {source}")
self._cache: dict[str, list[str]] = {}
def _get(self, path: str):
from urllib.request import urlopen
with urlopen(f"{self.source}{path}", timeout=60) as resp:
return json.load(resp)
def profiles(self) -> set[str]:
if self.remote:
return {a["name"] for a in self._get("/api/archives")}
return set(scan_archives(self.root))
def listing(self, user: str) -> list[str]:
"""Every filename belonging to a profile, across all its sidecars."""
if user in self._cache:
return self._cache[user]
names: list[str] = []
if self.remote:
try:
data = self._get(f"/api/archives/{user}/files")
except Exception:
data = []
files = data if isinstance(data, list) else data.get("files", [])
names = [f["path"] for f in files]
else:
prof = scan_archives(self.root).get(user)
for dirname in (prof.existing.values() if prof else ()):
d = self.root / dirname
if d.is_dir():
names += [f"{dirname}/{n}" for n in os.listdir(d)]
self._cache[user] = names
return names
# --------------------------------------------------------------------------
# gallery-dl configuration
# --------------------------------------------------------------------------
@@ -181,6 +241,11 @@ def build_config(rate: str, sleep_request: list[float],
"api": "rest", # never "graphql" -- see docstring
"sleep-request": sleep_request,
"sleep": sleep,
# The CDN does rate-limit: a first run at 3M/1-3s drew
# '429 Too Many Requests' from scontent-*.cdninstagram.com and
# lost two videos. Back off hard rather than retry fast.
"sleep-429": 120.0,
"retries": 8,
"videos": True,
"include": "", # never "all"; sources are explicit
# Directory is forced per-invocation with -D, because a reels
@@ -198,7 +263,8 @@ def build_config(rate: str, sleep_request: list[float],
},
},
},
"downloader": {"http": {"rate": rate}},
# `retries` here is the CDN-side counterpart to sleep-429 above.
"downloader": {"http": {"rate": rate, "retries": 8}},
"output": {"mode": "null"},
}
@@ -207,7 +273,7 @@ def build_config(rate: str, sleep_request: list[float],
# Planning and execution
# --------------------------------------------------------------------------
def gdl_command(src: Source, root: Path, config: Path, cookies: str,
def gdl_command(src: Source, staging: Path, config: Path, cookies: str,
archive_db: Path | None) -> list[str]:
cmd = [
"gallery-dl",
@@ -215,13 +281,15 @@ def gdl_command(src: Source, root: Path, config: Path, cookies: str,
"--cookies-from-browser", cookies,
]
if archive_db:
# gallery-dl's skip-archive. Seed it before the first real run or the
# whole 110k-file tree is re-downloaded; see --seed-archive.
# Without a seeded skip-archive, staging is empty and every file is
# re-downloaded; see seed_archive_db.
cmd += ["--download-archive", str(archive_db)]
if src.subcategory != "highlights":
cmd += ["--destination", str(root / src.directory)]
else:
cmd += ["--destination", str(root)]
# Forced destination -- never `{username}` -- because a reels tab returns
# collab reels owned by other accounts, which would otherwise be filed
# under the wrong profile. Highlights are the exception: their directory
# embeds a title only known mid-extraction, so the config formats it.
dest = staging if src.subcategory == "highlights" else staging / src.directory
cmd += ["--destination", str(dest)]
cmd.append(src.url)
return cmd
@@ -329,11 +397,48 @@ def probe_live(src: Source, config: Path, cookies: str) -> list[dict]:
return items
def rsync_command(staging: Path, dest: str, dry_run: bool) -> list[str]:
"""
Publish a staging tree into the archive.
`--ignore-existing` is not an optimisation, it is the safety property: the
archive deliberately outlives Instagram (posts exist here that Instagram no
longer serves), so publishing must only ever *add*. No `--delete`, and
nothing already present is overwritten — including sidecars, which get
rewritten on every run and would otherwise churn the synced share.
`dest` may be a local path or any rsync destination (`user@host:/path`),
because the archive usually is not writable from the fetch host.
"""
cmd = ["rsync", "-a", "--ignore-existing", "--partial", "--info=stats2"]
if dry_run:
cmd.append("--dry-run")
# Trailing slash: copy the *contents* of staging into dest.
cmd += [f"{staging}/", dest if dest.endswith("/") else dest + "/"]
return cmd
def publish(staging: Path, dest: str, dry_run: bool) -> int:
if not any(staging.iterdir()):
print(" nothing staged; skipping publish")
return 0
cmd = rsync_command(staging, dest, dry_run)
print(" " + " ".join(cmd))
return subprocess.run(cmd).returncode
def main() -> int:
ap = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=__doc__,
formatter_class=argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter)
ap.add_argument("--archives", required=True, type=Path,
help="archive root (one directory per profile plus sidecars)")
ap.add_argument("--index", required=True,
help="existing archive listing: a local root, or the "
"viewer's base URL (only a FILE LISTING is needed, "
"never the contents)")
ap.add_argument("--publish", required=True,
help="rsync destination for fetched files; a local path or "
"user@host:/path")
ap.add_argument("--staging", type=Path, required=True,
help="local scratch directory gallery-dl writes into")
g = ap.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True)
g.add_argument("--profile", action="append", default=[],
help="profile to sync; repeatable")
@@ -342,10 +447,10 @@ def main() -> int:
help="gallery-dl --cookies-from-browser value")
ap.add_argument("--archive-db", type=Path, default=None,
help="gallery-dl skip-archive sqlite path")
ap.add_argument("--rate", default="3M", help="per-download rate cap")
ap.add_argument("--sleep-request", nargs=2, type=float, default=[4.0, 7.0],
ap.add_argument("--rate", default="1M", help="per-download rate cap")
ap.add_argument("--sleep-request", nargs=2, type=float, default=[6.0, 10.0],
metavar=("MIN", "MAX"))
ap.add_argument("--sleep", nargs=2, type=float, default=[1.0, 3.0],
ap.add_argument("--sleep", nargs=2, type=float, default=[3.0, 6.0],
metavar=("MIN", "MAX"))
ap.add_argument("--no-stories", action="store_true",
help="skip stories and highlights (posts and reels only)")
@@ -356,25 +461,26 @@ def main() -> int:
help="actually run gallery-dl")
args = ap.parse_args()
if not args.archives.is_dir():
print(f"archives root not found: {args.archives}", file=sys.stderr)
return 2
if not shutil.which("gallery-dl"):
print("gallery-dl not on PATH", file=sys.stderr)
return 2
if not shutil.which("rsync"):
print("rsync not on PATH", file=sys.stderr)
return 2
profiles = scan_archives(args.archives)
index = ArchiveIndex(args.index)
names = index.profiles()
if args.profile:
missing = [p for p in args.profile if p not in profiles]
for p in missing:
print(f"note: {p} has no directory yet; it will be created")
profiles.setdefault(p, Profile(p))
selected = [profiles[p] for p in args.profile]
for p in args.profile:
if p not in names:
print(f"note: {p} is not in the index yet; it will be created")
selected = [Profile(p) for p in args.profile]
else:
selected = list(profiles.values())
selected = [Profile(p) for p in sorted(names)]
config = build_config(args.rate, list(args.sleep_request), list(args.sleep))
config_path = args.archives / ".gdl-sync.config.json"
args.staging.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
config_path = args.staging / "gdl-sync.config.json"
plan: list[tuple[Profile, Source]] = [
(prof, src)
@@ -386,34 +492,57 @@ def main() -> int:
print(f"sources : {len(plan)}")
print(f"pacing : {args.sleep_request[0]}-{args.sleep_request[1]}s between "
f"requests, rate cap {args.rate}")
print(f"staging : {args.staging}")
print(f"publish : {args.publish}")
print()
if not args.execute:
print(json.dumps(config, indent=2))
print()
for prof, src in plan:
dest = src.directory or "(per-highlight)"
print(f" {prof.user:<20} {src.kind:<11} -> {dest}")
print()
print(" " + " ".join(rsync_command(args.staging, args.publish, True)))
print("\ndry run; nothing fetched. pass --execute to run.")
return 0
config_path.write_text(json.dumps(config, indent=2))
failures = 0
for prof, src in plan:
if src.subcategory != "highlights":
(args.archives / src.directory).mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
cmd = gdl_command(src, args.archives, config_path, args.cookies,
args.archive_db)
print(f"==> {prof.user} / {src.kind}")
stage_dir = args.staging / (src.directory or ".")
stage_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
# Seed the skip-archive from what the archive already holds, so
# fetching into an empty staging directory pulls only what is missing.
# The listing pass this needs is one we have to make anyway.
if args.archive_db:
try:
live = probe_live(src, config_path, args.cookies)
held = index_existing(index.listing(prof.user))
seeded = seed_archive_db(args.archive_db, held, live,
src.subcategory)
print(f" seeded {seeded} of {len(live)} live items")
except subprocess.CalledProcessError as exc:
failures += 1
print(f" probe FAILED: {exc}", file=sys.stderr)
continue
cmd = gdl_command(src, args.staging, config_path, args.cookies,
args.archive_db)
result = subprocess.run(cmd)
if result.returncode != 0:
failures += 1
# Keep going: one private/renamed profile must not abort the run.
# Keep going: one private or renamed profile must not abort the run.
print(f" FAILED (exit {result.returncode})", file=sys.stderr)
# A sync NEVER deletes. The archive deliberately outlives Instagram --
# 2 posts in 0ct0ber19 exist only here now.
print(f"\ndone; {failures} source(s) failed")
# Publish once, at the end, so a partially-fetched profile never reaches
# the archive mid-run. Only ever adds -- see rsync_command.
print("\n==> publish")
if publish(args.staging, args.publish, dry_run=False) != 0:
failures += 1
print(f"\ndone; {failures} step(s) failed")
return 1 if failures else 0