Programmatically getting an access token for using the Facebook Graph API

Update 2018-08-23

Since this still gets some views and upvotes I just want to mention that by now there seems to exist a maintained 3rd party SDK: https://github.com/mobolic/facebook-sdk

Better late than never, maybe others searching for that will find it. I got it working with Python 2.6 on a MacBook.

This requires you to have

the Python facebook module installed: https://github.com/pythonforfacebook/facebook-sdk,
an actual Facebook app set up
and the profile you want to post to must have granted proper permissions to allow all the different stuff like reading and writing.

You can read about the authentication stuff in the Facebook developer documentation. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for details.

This blog post might also help with this: http://blog.theunical.com/facebook-integration/5-steps-to-publish-on-a-facebook-wall-using-php/

Here goes:

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding: utf-8

import facebook
import urllib
import urlparse
import subprocess
import warnings

# Hide deprecation warnings. The facebook module isn't that up-to-date (facebook.GraphAPIError).
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', category=DeprecationWarning)


# Parameters of your app and the id of the profile you want to mess with.
FACEBOOK_APP_ID     = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
FACEBOOK_PROFILE_ID = 'XXXXXX'


# Trying to get an access token. Very awkward.
oauth_args = dict(client_id     = FACEBOOK_APP_ID,
                  client_secret = FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET,
                  grant_type="client_credentials")
oauth_curl_cmd = ['curl',
                  'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?' + urllib.urlencode(oauth_args)]
oauth_response = subprocess.Popen(oauth_curl_cmd,
                                  stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
                                  stderr = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

try:
    oauth_access_token = urlparse.parse_qs(str(oauth_response))['access_token'][0]
except KeyError:
    print('Unable to grab an access token!')
    exit()

facebook_graph = facebook.GraphAPI(oauth_access_token)


# Try to post something on the wall.
try:
    fb_response = facebook_graph.put_wall_post('Hello from Python', \
                                               profile_id = FACEBOOK_PROFILE_ID)
    print fb_response
except facebook.GraphAPIError as e:
    print 'Something went wrong:', e.type, e.message

Error checking on getting the token might be better but you get the idea of what to do.

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