Obtaining a Facebook auth token for a command-line (desktop) application

Question

I am working for a charity which is promoting sign language, and they want to post a video to their FB page every day. There\'s a large (and growing) number of videos, so th

Answer 1

So, I finally got it working, without setting up a web server and doing a callback. The trick, counter-intuitively, was to turn off the "Desktop application" setting and not to request offline_access.

FaceBook::Graph's support for posting videos doesn't seem to work at the moment, so I ended up doing it in Ruby.

fb_auth = FbGraph::Auth.new(APP_ID, APP_SECRET)

client = fb_auth.client
client.redirect_uri = "https://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html"

if ARGV.length == 0
  puts "Go to this URL"
  puts client.authorization_uri(:scope => [:publish_stream, :read_stream] )
  puts "Then run me again with the code"
  exit
end

if ARGV.length == 1
  client.authorization_code = ARGV[0]
  access_token = client.access_token! :client_auth_body
  File.open("authtoken.txt", "w") { |io| io.write(access_token)  }
  exit
end

file, title, description = ARGV

access_token = File.read("authtoken.txt")
fb_auth.exchange_token! access_token
File.open("authtoken.txt", "w") { |io| io.write(fb_auth.access_token)  }

me = FbGraph::Page.new(PAGE_ID, :access_token => access_token)
me.video!(
    :source => File.new(file),
    :title => title,
    :description => description
)