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.
sleep: how many seconds to sleep between each request. Default is 0.
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',
 '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
Videos
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.