MRSS To Facebook Video App

Upload videos to any Facebook entity (Page, Event, User, etc.) from a MRSS feed.

Architecture

This app is primarily one script intended to be executed on the command line.

Optionally use Redis to capture the Facebook ID for a video guid, to prevent duplicate uploads.

Setup

Installing Python Dependencies

To run locally, make sure you have the [pip][pip] installed, the package manager for Python.

You will need to have Python 3 installed. This library has been tested with Python 3.4.3. On OSX you can install Python 3 via brew install python3. Most recent Linux distributions come with Python 3 pre-installed. You should be able to determine the path to your Python 3 executable via whereis python3.

You will need to set up a Python Virtual Environment:

# Make sure to use the correct path.
virtualenv --python=$(which python3) $HOME/.venv/mrss-to-facebook-video-app
source $HOME/.venv/mrss-to-facebook-video-app/bin/activate

Or you could use virtualenvwrapper.

Once you've activated the virtual environment, you can install the Python dependencies.

# Install the requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

Setting up Environment Variables

See .env.sample for expected environment variables.

Use SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL, SLACK_CHANNEL_SUCCESS and SLACK_CHANNEL_ERROR to send success and error messages to Slack. The webhook URL is required for either success or error, but both success and error are optional. Pick which you'd like to pay attention to. Each channel variable expects the human-readable value (e.g. #errors).

Generating OAuth tokens

OAuth tokens are needed to authorize requests to Facebook. They are stored as environment variables as well.

First, put your Facebook application client ID and secret in a facebook_client_secrets.json file formatted like this:

{
  "installed": {
    "client_id": "REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_FACEBOOK_CLIENT_ID",
    "client_secret": "REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_FACEBOOK_CLIENT_SECRET",
    "client_email": "",
    "client_x509_cert_url": "",
    "token_uri": "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.1/oauth/access_token",
    "auth_uri": "https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth",
    "auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "",
    "redirect_uris": [
      "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob",
      "oob"
    ]
  }
}

Second, generate the credentials and write them to a facebook-creds.json file. If you want to publish to a Facebook page, you'll need to request publish_actions, manage_pages and publish_pages:

$ mtfv oauth facebook_client_secrets.json facebook-creds.json publish_actions manage_pages publish_pages

Otherwise, you can just request publish_actions:

$ mtfv oauth facebook_client_secrets.json facebook-creds.json publish_actions

This will open a browser window, asking you to approve the request, which you should.