I am building a website for a comedy group which uses Facebook as one of their marketing platforms; one of the requirements for the new site is to display all of their Facebook events on a calendar.
Currently, I am just trying to put together a Python script which can pull some data from my own Facebook account, like a list of all my friends. I presume once I can accomplish this I can move to pulling more complicated data out of my clients account (since they have given me access to their account).
I have looked at many of the posts here, and also went through the Facebook API documentation, including Facebook Connect, but am really beating my head against the wall. Everything I have read seems like overkill, as it involves setting up a good deal of infrastructure to allow my app to set up connections to any arbitrary user's account (who authorizes me). Shouldn't it be much simpler, given I only ever need to access 1 account?
I cannot find a way to retrieve data without having to display the Facebook login window. I have a script which will retrieve all my friends, but it includes a redirect where I have to physically log myself in to Facebook.
Would appreciate any advice or links, I just feel like I must be missing something simple.
Thank you!
Just posting up my notes on the successful advice, should others find this post;
Per Daniel and William's advice, I obtained the right permissions using the Connect options. From William, this link explains how the Facebook connection works
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
This section on setting up the actual authentication was most helpful to me.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api
Basically, it goes as follows:
Post a link to the following URL. A user will need to physically click on it (even if that user is just you, the site admin).
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/HANDLER
This will redirect to a Facebook login, which will return to http://www.example.com/HANDLER after the user authenticates. If you wish to do more than basic reads and news feed updates you will need to include this variable in the above link: scope=offline_access,user_photos. The scope variable just includes a comma separated list of values, which Facebook will explicitly tell the authenticating user about during the login process, and they will have to OK. Most helpful for me was the offline_access flag (user_photos lets you get at their photos too), so I can pull content without someone logging in regularly (so long as I store the access token obtained later)
Have a script located at http://www.example.com/HANDLER that will take a variable from the request (so facebook will redirect to http://www.example.com/HANDLER&code=YOUR_CODE after authentication). Your handler needs to pull out the code variable, and then send the following request:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&
redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/oauth_redirect&
client_secret=YOUR_SECRET_KEY&
code=YOUR_CODE
This request will return a string of the form access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN.
Just parse off the 'access_token=', and you will have a token that you can use to access the facebook graph API, in requests like
http://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
This will return a JSON object containing all of your friends
Hope this saves someone else some not fun time straining through documentation. Thanks for the help!
It is true, that Facebook's API is targeted at developers who are creating apps that will be used by many users.
Thankfully, the new Graph API is much simpler to use than its predecessor, and shouldn't be terribly difficult for you to work with without using or creating a lot of underlying infrastructure.
You will need to implement authorization, but this is not difficult, and as long as you prompt the user for the offline_access permission, it'll only need to be done once.
The documentation on Desktop Authentication would probably be most relevant to you at this point, though you might want to move to the javascript-based authentication once you've got a web app up and running.
Once the authentication is done, all you're doing is making GET requests to various urls and working with the resulting JSON.
Here's the documentation about Events, and you can get a list of friends from the friends connection of a User.
I'm not expert on Facebook/Facebook Connect, however I've seen it used/used applications with it and it seems there's really only the 'official' way to do it. I'm afraid it looks like your best bet would probably be something along the lines of this.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Connect/Authentication_and_Authorization
Regardless of how you actually 'use' it, you'll still need to authorize the application to connect to the account and this means having a Facebook App as well.
The answer to Facebook application authentication is hard to find but is actually found within the "Analytics" page of the Graph API.
Specify the following: https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_cred&client_id=yourappid&client_secret=yourappsecret , you will then be given an access_token that you may use on all other calls.
The Facebook provided APIs do NOT currently provide this level of functionality.
Related
I am new to web programming- I've recently been familiarizing myself with the webapp2 framework. I'm trying to start building a website, and would like users to login to the site with Facebook and I'll need access to their friends list. I've been trying to find a way to do this- I found out about OAUTH2, and I think this may be a way to do this. All the tutorials for python and OAUTH2 that I've found have been using the google API, I'm not sure if it's any different, but I haven't been able to get it to work.
Does anyone have sample code they can post that uses OAUTH2 (or anything else) to get users to sign in through Facebook? Or any good resources that can help me with this?
Your app needs to authorize users with Facebook, since there's where the resources you need are (e.g. friend lists).
This is a classic use of OAuth2 and you don't have a way around it, because FB implements this protocol.
My suggestion is that you look at the Google sample and then adjust it for FB API. The important changes are:
The endpoint URLs (e.g. authorize, token and user profile
The scopes that define the extent of permissions you are requesting (e.g. list of friends)
The user profile (e.g. the information returned by FB on a user: name, e-mail, etc)
This is a very simple sample that does this in Python. It was meant to run in Google App Engine. The only caveat is that it uses our own library to encapsulate the flow. But you can use it to study how the basic protocol works. Run the live demo and turn on dev tools on your browser to see the network activity.
You will notice that OAuth2 is a rather simple protocol, using simple HTTP requests.
I'm trying to have a page in my webapp with a button 'Connect to Gmail', which sends the user to an authentication page, and when they get back their access token gets saved in my database for later use. I've been literally trying this for weeks, but I can't figure it out. I've tried xoauth, but it seems to only work as a stand-alone script.
Does anyone have some pointers on how to do this?
What you are looking for is OpenID. Check if some fits your need here:
http://djangopackages.com/grids/g/facebook-authentication/ (I know they write facebook authentication, though this page includes openid solutions and full featured solutions with Facebook/Twitter login as well)
I made good experience with django-socialregistration.
Essentially the same problem as this question but looking for a solution in Python. How to work around Twitter OAuth?
Ideally, I dont want to have to go through the hoops of setting up a user/login interface and backend since the work I'm doing is for internal purposes.
I would also like to bypass the part where I need to re-direct the user to Twitter for authorization.
Thanks
You'll want to use Twitter's OOB flow. This is explained nicely in this answer
Twitter API - OOB Flow
So, reading between the lines a little, you have a twitter account and a password because this is internal, so you don't want to go with an auth process that requires a user to interact with it?
The idea behind OAuth is that you don't ever find out what the user's password is; I agree that if I'm right about what you are trying to do that it isn't the right thing. The OOB Flow suggested by JohnD has the same problem.
If you do have an account/password, then you can work with submissions to the website directly, using the login form and the tweet form. Unfortunately this means you don't have access to the API (they nuked basic authentication via the API last year) -- depending on what you're trying to do that may or may not be a problem.
Edit:
Use OAuth and remember the token. It never expires, according to the twitter API docs, and since you presumably have some limited number of accounts that you care about, you can just jump through the OAuth hoops once for each account and you're done until you need another account. You can even do the whole thing programmatically given the username and password, assuming they don't stick a captcha in there at some point. But I suspect your best bet is to just use OAuth and store the tokens.
I just found this bash script that works, tested personally, just change --ssl to --sslv3.
It's based on a simpler auth method used on mobile.twitter.com, you can use the same principle to deal with it using urllib2 and re modules.
Otherwise you can consider to lean against a site like http://www.supertweet.net/
SuperTweet.net provides a safe
mechanism to use Basic Authentication
with the Twitter API in your scripts
and other Twitter apps. Simply Sign-up
via Twitter to authorize the MyAuth
API Proxy SuperTweet.net Application
and then assign a password of your
choosing (not your real Twitter
password) that your applications can
use with the http://api.supertweet.net
API.
edit: I see now this site was cited in an article linked in an answer of How to work around Twitter OAuth?, if you already read about it ignore this part.
If you're using a desktop or mobile application, then you can use xAuth. From the user perspective it's the same as basic auth for getting the original OAuth credentials, and there's no going to external pages. Note you have to be approved by the Twitter API team to get xAuth access.
You might consider looking at Mechanize. It automates browser activity.
So you could give your username/password to your script. Then the script should pass on those credentials to http://twitter.com/#!/login.
conventionally, if you manually login from that webpage, the response will be another page based on whether the credentials you used were correct.
Same thing here: Based on whether the credentials are correct, the response is another page.
You can then check whether the response is a "login failed" page or a "login passed" page, and do what you need to do from there.
Hope this helps
I have a friend that owns a small business and has a Page on Facebook. I want to help her manage it from a marketing perspective, and figure that it may be best to do so through their API.
I have skimmed their API documentation, and have a basic working knowledge of Python. What I can't figure out is if I can access their page's data with Python and grab the data on wall posts, who liked posts, etc. Is this possible? I can't find a decent tutorial for someone who is new to programming.
To provide context, I have been scraping the Twitter Search API for some time now and I am hoping there is something similar (request certain data elements, and have it returned as structured data I can analyze). I find their API extremely straight forward, and for Facebook, I don't know where to begin.
I don't want to create an application, I simply want to access the data that is related to my friend's page.
I am hoping to find some decent tutorials and help on what I will need to get started. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
You could try Pyjamas Desktop.
http://pyjs.org/
It runs python in an embedded web browser and gives you access to the html DOM.
This potentially means that you can use the JS api directly from python.
You will need to be running a server locally though.
Basically to automate posting stuff to the persons profile you need to get their oath token and then make API calls w/ that token.
Here are steps to get API token:
Register APP w/ facebook and get app id
Have your friend click this link https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?
client_id=[your app id here]&
type=user_agent&
scope=email,read_stream,,,user_about_me,offline_access,publish_stream&
redirect_uri=http://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html
Then record that token for future
You can now use any available python FB lib to post and manage that FB page.
This should get you started:
http://eggie5.com/20-getting-started-w-facebook-api
I just want to import my facebook status and photos to my personal django website but all the examples and documentation i can find are for developing facebook applications.
A simple rss feed would be enough but it doesnt seem to exist in facebook.
Do i really have to create a full facebook app to do this?
A simple facebook application isn't that hard ... excluding trying to decipher the soup on developers.facebook.com.
The "problem" is that you need to get an application key, application secret, and sometimes a session key in order to access the web services. Unless someone is sharing a service to do just that (I haven't looked, and you'd need to trust them) then the only way to fulfill the requirements are to create an application. However, the application key/application secret don't actually require that you write anything. They will show up in the Facebook Developer Application (the application that allows you to edit your applications...)
Now, all you need is a session key (however, a session key is not always required, see the Understanding Sessions link below) -- and hopefully a permanent one. To do this, ask for the extended offline_access permission**. If you grant that to an application then it can get a session for you whenever it feels like it (or rather, the session does not follow the one-hour expiration policies for that application). Extended permissions. Understanding Sessions. Oh, but ignore that 'auth.renewOfflineSession(UID)' example -- the method doesn't exist. I told you the "developer" documentation was soup :-)
You can use the URL in format:
http://www.facebook.com/tos.php?api_key=YOURAPIKEY&req_perms=offline_access to request the permission of yourself. Now see the links below :-)
Extra information in:
**I'm not entirely sure if new changes to the FB policy affect forever-sessions, but this link seems more than relevant to the task at hand:
http://blog.jylin.com/2009/10/01/loading-wall-posts-using-facebookstream_get/
Getting offline_access to work with Facebook
Facebook offline access step-by-step
(You need never post/share your facebook application -- you can keep it in sandbox mode forever.)
Probably. Anything that bypassed authentication would be a fairly large privacy issue.
With the release of the new graph api, this is pretty simple once you get your oauth token. Unfortunately you will need to create an app, but it can be a rather small one to get your oauth token so facebook can authorize your requests. You can use the python sdk here: http://github.com/facebook/python-sdk/
Once you have your token, you make a call to: https://graph.facebook.com/[your profile]/statuses?token=[your token]
And you will get json back.
If you first login to facebook and then go to the documentation page you can see the working example by clicking on the statuses link in the connections table.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user