Integrate Instagram login in iOS – Tutorial

Introduction to the post Integrate Instagram login in iOS app in Swift

Instagram is the popular app that allows user to share pictures and small videos with their followers and people around the world. In iOS app, developers can utilize Instagram Api in two ways

1) Login to the app using Instagram credentials

2) Share picture from the app to Instagram

For 2nd option you can check share pictures to Instagram programmatically from iOS app as in this post we are only going to cover login via Instagram api in swift/swift3 language. If you are looking for objective c version then please check integrate instagram in ios objective C

Register your app with Instagram.

Now Instagram requires developer to submit there app for approval as like Facebook. Developers have to build their app in sandbox mode and when they want to go to the stores, they need approval from Instagram so that their could work in live environment.

Follow the steps to register your app with Instagram,

1) Login to https://www.instagram.com/developer/

2) Click on Register client, by clicking on Register Your Application button (shown in image below)

3) If you had created apps before this one then you have to click “Register a new client“

4) Fill in all the details under “Details” tab and under “Security” tab uncheck “Disable implicit oAuth” option. This will tell Instagram that we are using unsigned login approach. Signed login approach will be covered in separate tutorial.

5) Click Register, to confirm your app registration with Instagram.

6) As soon as you register app, you will be navigated to page where all your apps are listed. Click on manage button so that you can get client-secret for your app.

Code to login with Instagram in iOS using swift language

Designing UI part for instagram login in iOS

I am not going to cover the app building from scratch, instead we will cover only Instagram-login View controller code.

First create a constant file as shown below

Create an new UIViewController class and name it as InstagramLoginVC. Open InstagramLoginVC.swift and declare our UIWebView and UIActivityIndicatorView IBOutlet’s.

Open your storyboard file or .xib file and drag, drop UIWebView and UIActivityIndicatorView to it. Connect IBOutlet’s to both of the controls.

Integration of Instagram login in iOS

Open your InstagramLoginVC.swift class. First we will create a function named unSignedRequest(), which will make request to Instagram server

Now we call the above created unSignedRequest() function in viewDidLoad()

As you are seeing that we assigned UIWebView delegate to self in our viewDidLoad() function, it’s time to implement UIWebViewDelegates

In above code we implemented UIWebView delegates. Apart from shouldStartLoadWith delegate, rest are simply used to hide and show UIActivityIndicatorView.

In shouldStartLoadWith delegate, we call a function named as checkRequestForCallbackURL()
which accepts URLRequest as parameter. But still we did not write it’s definition. So without wasting any time just write it

In checkRequestForCallbackURL() , we check for the URL returned by Instagram and if the URL has our REDIRECTURI as prefix then it means we have our access token/ Auth token in it and we have to extract it. At this moment we will stop our UIWebView to load new requests and extract extract it.

Complete code for UNSIGNED Instragram login request in swift

Where to go from here

In this article you learned how to make UNSIGNED login request to Instagram using Swift3 in iOS app development. Download the source code from here InstagramLogin-Swift.zip

If you have any questions then please feel free to comment. Thanks for reading.