Been doing a lot of competitive research for clients lately — checking hashtag volumes, tracking top posts in a niche, that kind of thing. Kept switching between Claude Code and browser tabs to cross-reference stuff manually. Got annoying fast.
Found hikerapi-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server that exposes 100+ Instagram endpoints as tools directly inside Claude Code. Figured I'd try it.
Setup was straightforward. The one thing I did differently was keeping the API key out of config files entirely — passed it as an environment variable instead. Smaller attack surface if I accidentally commit something.
Also filtered down the tool groups with HIKERAPI_TAGS because 100+ tools showing up in context is chaos. I only need hashtag search and competitor profile data, so I scoped it to just those.
"env": {
