Welcome to Feegra, the Facebook Feed Grabber.

Feegra scraps Facebook pages for posts, and stores them in an SQLite database. The pages are queued and handled sequentially until all posts from all pages are retrieved.

WARNING: This is not-finished-yet Alpha-quality software. Don't user it! (for now).

Usage

First install required dependencies by running:

composer install

Then configure Feegra, configurations are stored in config.php. You need to add your Facebook App Id, and App Secret, and a User Access Token. See Limitations section bellow. You can also, optionally, change paths for the database and logfile, and change the pagination size.

Then initialize Feegra by running:

feegra init

This prepares the Database and sets up a cronjob to process the queue once every minute.

To add a page to the queue, run:

feegra add {facebook_page_id}

Where {facebook_page_id} is replaced by the ID of the page you want to scrap. The id can be easily retrieved from the page URL, it usually looks like:

https://facebook.com/page-id/possible-other-stuff

To process one step of the queue (one page), run

feegra process

You don't have to do this manually. The init step adds a cronjob that will be called once a minute to do this.

To list queued pages, run

feegra list

To list posts retrieved from a page, run:

feegra list {facebook_page_id}

Limitations

Currently Facebook does not allow access to the public feeds of Facebook pages. For apps without submitting the app to Facebook staff for review, and getting subsequent approval. Which is currently out of the project's scope.

Developers can only access the feeds of pages if they have the role of an admin on that page. Or through Facebook Test Users on Test Pages.

The application is currently only tested with a Test User user-token to scrap Test Pages.

See:

• See the 'Permissions' section under: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v3.2/page/feed#read

• See the "Page Public Content Access" section under: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review/feature/#reference-PAGES_ACCESS

• For instructions on how to create test users: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/test-users/

• For instructions on how to create test pages: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/test-pages/

TODO

• Refactor the logging system, and add more logs.
• Refactor all the random exit() into exceptions, and use a central exit point.
• Allow re-queuing pages to get new page and post updates after the scrapping completes.
• Make crontab entry optional, users can just call process from their own scripts.
• Maybe integrate Facebook user authentication & authorization to allow users to use their own tokens on public pages.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2019 Mohammad Matini

Feegra is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

Feegra is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Feegra.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.