cloudsan/facebook-scraper

Scrape Facebook public pages without an API key

Facebook Scraper

Scrape Facebook public pages without an API key. Inspired by twitter-scraper.

Install

pip install facebook-scraper

Usage

Send the unique page name as the first parameter and you're good to go:

>>> from facebook_scraper import get_posts

>>> for post in get_posts('nintendo', pages=1):
...     print(post['text'][:50])
...
The final step on the road to the Super Smash Bros
We’re headed to PAX East 3/28-3/31 with new games

CLI usage

$ facebook-scraper --filename nintendo_page_posts.csv --pages 1 nintendo

Use

$ facebook-scraper --help

for more details on CLI usage

Optional parameters

• group: group id, to scrape groups instead of pages. Default is None.
• pages: how many pages of posts to request, usually the first page has 2 posts and the rest 4. Default is 10.
• timeout: how many seconds to wait before timing out. Default is 5.
• credentials: tuple of user and password to login before requesting the posts. Default is None.
• extra_info: bool, if true the function will try to do an extra request to get the post reactions. Default is False.
• youtube_dl: bool, use Youtube-DL for (high-quality) video extraction. You need to have youtube-dl installed on your environment. Default is False.

Post example

{'post_id': '2257188721032235',
 'text': 'Don’t let this diminutive version of the Hero of Time fool you, '
         'Young Link is just as heroic as his fully grown version! Young Link '
         'joins the Super Smash Bros. series of amiibo figures!',
 'time': datetime.datetime(2019, 4, 29, 12, 0, 1),
 'image': 'https://scontent.flim16-1.fna.fbcdn.net'
          '/v/t1.0-0/cp0/e15/q65/p320x320'
          '/58680860_2257182054366235_1985558733786185728_n.jpg'
          '?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent.flim16-1.fna'
          '&oh=31b0ba32ec7886e95a5478c479ba1d38&oe=5D6CDEE4',
 'images': ['https://scontent.flim16-1.fna.fbcdn.net'
          '/v/t1.0-0/cp0/e15/q65/p320x320'
          '/58680860_2257182054366235_1985558733786185728_n.jpg'
          '?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent.flim16-1.fna'
          '&oh=31b0ba32ec7886e95a5478c479ba1d38&oe=5D6CDEE4'],
 'likes': 2036,
 'comments': 214,
 'shares': 0,
 'reactions': {'like': 135, 'love': 64, 'haha': 10, 'wow': 4, 'anger': 1},  # if `extra_info` was set
 'post_url': 'https://m.facebook.com/story.php'
             '?story_fbid=2257188721032235&id=119240841493711',
 'link': 'https://bit.ly/something'}

Notes

• There is no guarantee that every field will be extracted (they might be None).
• Shares doesn't seem to work at the moment.
• Group posts may be missing some fields like time and post_url.
• Group scraping may return only one page and not work on private groups.

To-Do

• Async support
• Image galleries
• Profiles or post authors
• Comments

Alternatives and related projects

• facebook-post-scraper. Has comments. Uses Selenium.
• facebook-scraper-selenium. "Scrape posts from any group or user into a .csv file without needing to register for any API access".
• Ultimate Facebook Scraper. "Scrapes almost everything about a Facebook user's profile". Uses Selenium.
• Unofficial APIs. List of unofficial APIs for various services, none for Facebook for now, but might be worth to check in the future.
• major-scrapy-spiders. Has a profile spider for Scrapy.
• facebook-page-post-scraper. Seems abandoned.
  • FBLYZE. Fork (?).
• RSSHub. Generates an RSS feed from Facebook pages.
• RSS-Bridge. Also generates RSS feeds from Facebook pages.