I’ve been using Hugo since 2016 to build this website. Some pages containInstagram shortcode . Today they are broken 💔

Lets fix it!

A quick search on Git issues shows #7879 :

Basically Facebook has ended free access to the Instagram API. This affects both the regular and simple Instagram shortcodes.

The announcement of Facebook is HERE .

The problem should be fixed in the next release of Hugo .

Remediation

As temporary remediation I will comment out all the references to Instagram shortcode so I can build my website and publish updates.

The change affects 12 links in total, you can tell I’m not a heavy Instagram user .

Some posts will lose some content, the impact shouldn’t be significant based on the metrics of this website 😢

As I did before I use sed .

Original line (with additional spaces between {{ and }} to avoid unwanted rendering):

{ { < instagram 12345678901 >} }

commented line (with additional spaces between {{ and }} to avoid unwanted rendering):

<!-- { {< instagram 12345678901 >} } -->

Sed command to get this result:

sed -i 's/{.*{< instagram\(.*\)>}.*}/<!--  -->/g' *.md

Great!

Lesson learned

  1. Relaying on other product’s API means being dependent on them (obvisous but easy to forget)
  2. My previous blog about sed was really helpful to apply the remediation in minutes instead of hours digging in the documentation of sed
  3. In case of doubt, blog it!