facebookgraph

facebookgraph

facebookgraph is a Node.js client/interface for the Facebook Graph API.

• it uses axios instead of requests
• it uses async/await syntax
• it works only with Node.js 7.6+
• it uses TypeScript
• it comes with built-in pagination for fetching data from particular nodes or via search

Table of Contents

• Install
• Usage
  • Request object using ID
  • Search API
  • Pagination
  • Posting text messages, photos or videos
  • Batch requests

Install

yarn add facebookgraph

or

npm install facebookgraph

Usage

In order to use Facebook Graph API you need to have an access token which is being used to initialize FacebookGraph object. Here's an example how to fetch 5 posts of the page with the id 523008607856853.

const FacebookGraph = require('facebookgraph');

const graph = new FacebookGraph('<Your Facebook Access Token>')
const posts = await graph.fetch('523008607856853', 'posts', 5)
console.log(posts);

Request object using ID

const zuck = await graph.get('4');

{ id: '4',
  first_name: 'Mark',
  last_name: 'Zuckerberg',
  link: 'https://www.facebook.com/app_scoped_user_id/4/',
  name: 'Mark Zuckerberg',
  updated_time: '2017-01-26T08:32:59+0000' }

Search API

Search API endpoint is: https://graph.facebook.com/v2.8/search. You can search through objects of type user, page, event, group, place, placetopic.

The payload object has three properties: a search term (q), a search type (type) property and fields of each object. Check out the docs to see which fields can be requested for each object.

const pages = await graph.search({ q: 'geek', type: 'page', fields: 'name, link' })

The code above requests the name and link fields to be returned which are the part of the page public profile and do not require additional permissions. The Facebook Graph API's /search end point only returns publicly available information.

The syntax for requesting the field of a field is field{nestedField}; to request more than one nested field, separate them by commas: field{nestedField1, nestedField2, nestedField3}; e.g. specify photos.limit(2) to return only 2 photos, or photos.limit(2){link, comments.limit(3)} to return only 2 photos but link and up to 3 comments for each one.

const users = await graph.search({ q: 'geek', type: 'user', fields: 'photos.limit(2){link, comments.limit(2)}' }

Pagination

By default, .search and .fetch get only first 25 corresponding elements. It is possible, however, get more results as pagination is already incorporated. There is a 2nd paramater size for both .search and .fetch which defines how many elements should be fetched in total: it can be set either to a particular number or as Infinity to go through all the results pages and gather all results

const pages = await graph.search({ q: 'geek', type: 'page', fields: 'name, link' }, Infinity)

const posts = await graph.fetch('523008607856853', 'posts', 100)

Posting text messages, photos or videos

const post = await graph.post('me', { message: 'This is a test message.', link: 'https://zaiste.net' });

Set no_story to hide the post from showing up in the user feed.

Batch requests

const r = await graph.batch([
  { method: "GET", relative_url: "me"},
  { method: "GET", relative_url: "me/friends?limit=10"}
])