I'm trying to build a scraping script to get a bunch of Discord server's total members. I actually did that with Puppeteer like below but I think my IP address has been banned because I'm getting "Invite Invalid" error from Discord even though invite links are working.
My question is that does Discord have APIs to get any server's total member count? Or is there any 3rd party library for that purpose? Or any other method?
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer')
const discordMembers = async ({ server, browser }) => {
if (!server) return
let totalMembers
const page = await browser.newPage()
try {
await page.goto(`https://discord.com/invite/${server}`, {
timeout: 3000
})
const selector = '.pill-qMtBTq'
await page.waitForSelector(selector, {
timeout: 3000
})
const totalMembersContent = await page.evaluate(selector => {
return document.querySelectorAll(selector)[1].textContent
}, selector)
if (totalMembersContent) {
totalMembers = totalMembersContent
.replace(/ Members/, '')
.replace(/,/g, '')
totalMembers = parseInt(totalMembers)
}
} catch (err) {
console.log(err.message)
}
await page.close()
if (totalMembers) return totalMembers
}
const asyncForEach = async (array, callback) => {
for (let i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
await callback(array[i], i, array)
}
}
const run = async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
headless: true,
args: ['--no-sandbox']
})
const servers = ['tQp4pSE', '3P5K3dzgdB']
await asyncForEach(servers, async server => {
const members = await discordMembers({ server, browser })
console.log({ server, members })
// result
// { server: 'tQp4pSE', members: 57600 }
// { server: '3P5K3dzgdB', members: 159106 }
})
await browser.close()
}
run()
Update: Mar 22, 2022
Thanks for @Vaviloff's answer we can actually access Discord's private APIs but the problem is it's only accessible over browser. I'm getting Request failed with status code 400
issue from Axios. Is it a CORS issue? How do we get the results in a Node.js app?
const axios = require('axios')
const discordMembers = async ({ server }) => {
try {
const apiResult = await axios({
data: {},
method: 'get',
url: `https://discord.com/api/v9/invites/${server}?with_counts=true&with_expiration=true`
})
console.log(apiResult)
} catch (err) {
console.log(err)
}
}
discordMembers({ server: 'tQp4pSE' })
A lot of modern web applications have their own internal APIs. Oftentimes you can spot frontend making requests to it, by using Networking tab in Devtools (filter by Fetch/XHR type):
Such API endpoints can change any time of course, but usually the last for a long time and is a rather convenient way of scraping
Currently Discord uses this URL for basic instance description:
https://discord.com/api/v9/invites/tQp4pSE?with_counts=true&with_expiration=true
By accessing it you get the desired data:
Update
To make your code work don't send any data in the request:
const apiResult = await axios({
method: 'get',
url: `https://discord.com/api/v9/invites/${server}?with_counts=true&with_expiration=true`
})