Automatically post to Pinterest

This came about from needing a way to automatically post to a Pinterest board.

Unlike most social sites, Pinterest doesn’t have a public API to handle auto posting so it took a bit of finagling and a Node.js package called Pin-It Node which does most of the heavy lifting.

var PinIt = require('pin-it-node');
 
var pinIt = new PinIt({
    username: 'your_pinterest_username',
    password: 'your_pinterest_password'
});
 
var settings = {
    boardId: 'Numeric_board_id',
    url: process.argv[2],
    description: process.argv[3],
    media: process.argv[4]
};
 
pinIt.pin(settings , function(err, pinObj) {
    if (err) {
        console.log('Error');
        console.log(err);
        return;
    }
    console.log('Success!');
    console.log(pinObj);
});

Once the script is in place, you’ll run it like this.

$ node pin-it.js "Pin Title" "This is a description for the pin" "http://example/image.jpg"

You will need the numeric ID for the board you’re posting to. You can either dig through the HTML source to find it or use a tool that I kicked up in an afternoon because I didn’t want to dig through the HTML more than once.

And originally I was looking for a PHP script that would do the same. But since I wasn’t able to find anything that worked, I wound up just running shell_exec to call this script from the PHP file.