open-social-distributor

Facebook

To post to pages you control, it’s sufficient to create an app and request the appropriate scopes (see below) when generating your access tokens.

If you want to post to pages you do not own (ie. on behalf of other businesses or people), you’ll need to pass additional approvals by Facebook to be granted advanced API permissions. This capability is out of scope for this project.

NB. Facebook removed support for posting to a user’s personal feed in 2018.

Facebook connection strings

type=facebook;code=<SHORTCODE>;mode=page;page_id=<PAGE_ID>;page_token=<PAGE_TOKEN>
type=facebook;code=<SHORTCODE>;mode=user;user_token=<USER_TOKEN>

• SHORTCODE - a unique code to refer to the social network instance, this will appear in logs
• MODE - set this to: Page (case insensitive)

Page mode

• PAGE_ID - Id of the page to post to
• PAGE_TOKEN - A page access token obtained through the process outlined in Facebook notes

Tools

• Meta for Developers (Facebook developer console)
• Graph API Explorer
• Access Token Debugger

Scripts

Some of the activities described below are implemented as scripts, found in this repository:

Script	Purpose
/scripts/fb-get-long-user-access-token.sh	Exchange an app’s short-lived user access token for a long-lived one.
/scripts/fb-get-all-page-access-tokens.sh	Retrieve all page access tokens for the given user.

Access tokens

Duration	User token	Page token
Short-lived	1 hour	1 hour
Long-lived	60 days	Indefinite

NB. Although some tokens may last a long time, they can be invalidated if needs be.

Get a user access token (explorer)

• Visit: Graph API Explorer
• Meta App: Select your Facebook app’s name
• User or Page: Select User Token
• Set permissions: public_profile
• Click Generate Access Token if the explorer hasn’t provided one for you.

A popup dialog will prompt you to grant the public profile permission to the app.

See also: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/pages/access-tokens#get-a-page-access-token

Get a long-lived user access token (CLI)

You can exchange a short-lived token for a long lived one:

curl -i -X GET "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?grant_type=fb_exchange_token&
  client_id=APP-ID&
  client_secret=APP-SECRET&
  fb_exchange_token=SHORT-LIVED-USER-ACCESS-TOKEN"

Get a page access token (explorer)

• Visit: Graph API Explorer
• Meta App: Select your Facebook app’s name
• User or Page: Select your page
• Set the following permissions:
  • pages_manage_posts
  • pages_read_engagement
  • pages_show_list
• Click Generate Access Token if the explorer hasn’t provided one for you.

A popup dialog will prompt you to grant these page permissions to the app.

• If you provided a short-lived user access token, your page access token will be short-lived (1 hour).
• If you provided a long-lived user access token, you page access token will be long-lived (indefinite).

Get a page access token (CLI)

You can exchange your user access token for a page access token:

curl -i -X GET "https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE-ID?
  fields=access_token&
  access_token=USER-ACCESS-TOKEN"

• If you provided a short-lived user access token, your page access token will be short-lived (1 hour).
• If you provided a long-lived user access token, you page access token will be long-lived (indefinite).

Get all access tokens for your pages

curl -i -X GET "https://graph.facebook.com/USER-ID/accounts?
  fields=name,access_token&
  access_token=USER-ACCESS-TOKEN"

• If you provided a short-lived user access token, your page access token will be short-lived (1 hour).
• If you provided a long-lived user access token, you page access token will be long-lived (indefinite).

This site is open source. Improve this page.