Code for collecting data on any public Facebook group.

docker pull mchirico/facebook-group-scrape

Create a tmp dir

mkdir -p tmp

Once the image is downloaded, run it.

docker run -it -v `pwd`/tmp:/tmp/data mchirico/facebook-group-scrape /bin/sh -c 'cd src && ./mainRun.sh'

2016-05-28
2016-06-04
2016-06-11
2016-06-18
2016-06-25
...

The command above creates the file database.sqlite. You can copy this file out after you get the container id from the "docker ps -a" command. Note below my id was 11b4f36b58a0. Obviously your id will be something different.

docker ps -a

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                            COMMAND                  CREATED             
11b4f36b58a0        mchirico/facebook-group-scrape   "/bin/sh -c 'cd src &"   About a minute ago  

# Now bring the database.sqlite file to your host
# My id was 11b4f36b58a0. Yours will be different

docker cp 11b4f36b58a0:/src/data/database.sqlite .

At this point you should have data from 2016-05-28 from the Facebook Group "Unofficial Cheltenham Township", Facebook group id 25160801076. You can put your own group id in tokenf.py

cat tokenf.py

TOKEN='173263836xx..D4'  # <--- This token may have expired. Replace with your own.
...
FACEBOOK_GROUP='25160801076'  # <----- Set to the group you want.

Note. You shoud set your own TOKEN. It's likely that after 90 days the TOKEN in this docker file will have expired.

If you're having trouble getting the group id, view the Facebook page source and look for group_id. For example, https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheCheltenhamChronicle.org/ has the group_id=999833573397613.

That's it. You're done the quick run of the prototype.

Here's an example of getting the group id.

If you don't want to run this from a Docker image, you'll need to install Pandas. You can look at the requirement.txt file. This is setup for Python 2.7

You probably want to use an App toke, since it will stay valid for a few months.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

a. Select an App in the drop down box. Or add a new App and select.

b. Select 'Get App Token'

 You'll want to paste this token in the file tokenf.py. Or, you 
 can use my token.

a. The groupid goes in tokenf.py

    FACEBOOK_GROUP='25160801076'