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How to post facebook programmingly?

·463 words·
Implement Facebook Graph Api
Table of Contents

Recenyly, my side project needs to post to facebook page automatically. I found that facebook provides a Graph API to do this. Here is the steps to post to facebook page programmingly.

We need to create an app in facebook developer console, add permissons in Graph API ,get the token and use the token to post to facebook page.

Create App
#

First, we need to create an app in facebook developer console. We can go to Meta for Developers and click My Apps to create a new app.

Graph API permissions
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After creating the app, we need to add the permission to the app. We can go to Tools > Graph API Explorer and add the permission we need.

If we want to post and comment to facebook page, we need to add the following permissions.

  • pages_show_list
  • pages_messaging
  • pages_manage_posts
  • pages_read_engagement
  • pages_manage_engagement
  • pages_read_user_content

Token
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After adding the permission, we can get the token in Access Token tab. Noted, it is only short-term token. We need to exchange it to long-term token and page token.

Short-term User Token
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Long-ten User Token
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We can find the App ID and App Secret in Settings > Basic. Addition the short-term access token which we just got ,we can use the following API to exchange the long-term user token.

# HTTP GET METHOD
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token
	?grant_type=fb_exchange_token
	&client_id=<APP_ID>
	&client_secret=<APP_SECRET>
	&fb_exchange_token=<SHORT_TERM_USER_TOKEN>


// response
{
  "access_token":"...", // long-term user token
  "token_type":"bearer",
  "expires_in":5183501 // seconds
}

Page Token
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Final step of token is to exchange the page token. We can use the following API to exchange the page token. We can find the Page ID in facebook page About > Page Transparency > Page ID.

# HTTP GET METHOD
https://graph.facebook.com/<PAGE_ID>
	?fields=access_token
	&access_token=<LONG_TERM_USER_TOKEN>

Live Mode
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Not finish yet. Till last step, we can only use the app in development mode. In development mode, we can also post and comment programmatically. But the post and comment are only visible to the app developer.

When we want to switch to live mode, we need to provide the privacy policy URL. We can use the following website to generate the privacy policy URL.

I use Free Privacy Policy Generator to generate the privacy policy page and duplicate it to my webpage. It provide the privacy policy URL, we can use it to switch to live mode.

Facebook Post API
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After everything is ready, we can use the following API to post and comment to facebook page.

Post
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# HTTP POST METHOD
https://graph.facebook.com/<PAGE_ID>/feed
  ?message=<POST_CONTENT>
  &access_token=<PAGE_TOKEN>

// response
{
    "id": <POST_ID>
}

#

Comment
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# HTTP POST METHOD
https://graph.facebook.com/<POST_ID>/comments
  ?message=<COMMENT_CONTENT>
  &access_token=<PAGE_TOKEN>

// response
{
    "id": <COMMENT_ID>
}

References
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EL
Author
EL
Geeky Geekery