An approach that works in 2019
I was recently trying to achieve something similar (to the use case described in this thread), but I wanted to make sure to respect Facebook's current policies, so I did a little research and here I'm sharing what I found.
My use case
So, as I said already, my use case is very similar to the one described here; that is:
- I'm doing some work for a school district.
- They are using a software tool to manage pretty much everything that relates to school transportation.
- That tool allows them to send email notifications (to subscribers) when they publish bus delay alerts and school closure alerts.
- A lot of people in the community follow the organization on their Facebook page, and that's the only place they look for those alerts.
- So an employee of the organization has to manually publish each notification on the Facebook page (in addition to creating it in the transportation software). Moreover, those notifications eventually expire (or are simply deleted before they expire), so the employee has to go back later on to delete them manually as well.
- It's a waist of time, so what we are trying to do here is to develop as simple system that periodically polls the software tool's database for new (and expired) notifications and update them (i.e. add and remove) on the Facebook page.
This is, in my view, a legitimate use case, but I wasn't sure how to implement it in a way that's in line with Facebook's policies.
The accepted answer
I followed the steps of the accepted answer and it worked, except that things appear to have changed: now, even though the generated page token does not expire, access to data does expire after around 60 days. You will see that as well if you follow the procedure and inspect the page token in the FB Token Debugger Tool.
Besides, the fact that the generated page tokens are tied to the user account is also unfortunate, because if the user updates his/her password, then the page token also gets invalidated.
How to do it in 2019
After several hours of research, I stumbled upon the following Facebook documentation article: Business Login for Direct Businesses.
It turns out that it is now possible, following the steps described in the above article, to generate a page token that is not associated to any particular Facebook user account and which will not expire (unless the FB App gets deleted or the underlying application token gets deleted, you know...)
So here are the steps and the most important parts:
- You need a Business Manager account.
- Verification will be required and a digital contract will have to be signed.
- You need to add the target Facebook page to that account.
- You need to create a Facebook App, and transfer that app to the same Business Manager account as well.
- The app will have to go through Facebook's review process, because the following permissions will be needed:
manage_pages and publish_pages.
- Important note For the posts made using the generate page token to be visible to users other than the application administrators, that app will need to have been published and approved.
- You may still experiment with the concept without submitting for review, but the posts won't be publicly visible.
- In the Business Manager account (only after your app and page have been added to the account), you need to create what's called a System User, and give that user admin role (or permissions) to the target Facebook page.
- A system user is owned by the Business Manager account, and isn't tied to a specific user. My current understanding is that one major use case for a system user is programmatic access to Facebook's Graph API (just what we need).
- Then, for that system user, you need to generate a access token (which will be never-expiring). You will be prompted to select for which app. You will then select your target app.
- You will then need to use the generated app token to generate a page token, which will also be never-expiring. The procedure is described in this article as:
GET /<PAGE_ID>?fields=access_token&access_token=<SYSTEM_USER_ACCESS_TOKEN>
That token will never expire, and it won't be tied to a particular Facebook user, so it's exactly what we need!
The last part is to make sure that your Facebook app gets approved by Facebook. It's in fact the most important part, because the whole procedure is worthless if people don't see our posts.
I wanted to know for sure that I could rely on the above procedure to build something for my client without Facebook rejecting it in the end, so, beforehand (i.e. before starting to work on my client's project), I went through the whole process of creating a page, an app, a Business Manager account, etc. I verified my business. I submitted my app for review. In my request, I was very specific about my use case and emphasized that the app was for "self-use" (i.e. that the organization is developing an app for itself, not for other Facebook users). I got approved without less than 24 hours.
A few other notes about the app review process:
- I had to select a platform for the app, so I selected website.
- I had to indicate why the app needed the two permissions and how it was going to use them.
- I had to indicate why the reviewer would not be able to sign into my app and try it (i.e. because the app will be used by a worker process).
- For the mandatory screencasts, I simply presented manual operations in the terminal using the
curl utility (to generate the page token and make posts to the Facebook page). I also showed how I was using Business Manager to link the system user to the page and generate a token, and so on.
- Again, I was very specific about my use case, and I think that that helped.
I hope this information will be useful to people with similar use cases.
