Simple Python script to post in facebook wall

Question

I'm very new to python scripting and anything online in general, but I wanted to start somewhere interesting so I came up with a goal to write a simple desktop .py file that everytime I run just simply posts 'Hello World' to my facebook wall under my name.

In the end, I managed by just hardcoding (to my knowledge) a User Access Token and using the facebook graph under that token

facebookGraph = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token="qwertyuiop")
fb_response = facebookGraph.put_object("me", "feed", message="Hello World")

now the docs say that the User Token's lifetime is quite short and I don't really like the idea of having to manually going in and copying it into my program (even if its at every 2 hours or 2 months) so I made a second attempt by instead fetching an App Token to which I enabled every permission to access my account

def FetchAppAccessToken(app_id, app_secret):
        headers = {'grant_type': 'client_credentials', 'client_id': app_id, 'client_secret': app_secret}
        response = requests.post('https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?', params = headers)
        logging.debug(response.text)
        return response

#then.. get the right substring within response and use the graph as before 

but I'm always met with

facebook.GraphAPIError: An active access token must be used to query information about the current user.

I thought that maybe using the User Token was the way to go, but after several hours of trial and error including trying to get the User Token by supplying an email and password, I read that it was not possible at all without user interaction. So going back to App Tokens and more reading. I came across using PHP within Python or creating a Login Flow with OAuth/OAuth2 (which I have neither experience with) to retrieve a token that I can use, but I'm starting to feel like I'm getting off track on what I'm supposed to be using.

Is there a simpler way like providing email and password to a file that as long as its in my desktop would accomplish that task?

Also, I'd like to avoid opening any browser and click simulations to do it (if its even possible that way).

Answer 1

Not sure if this is the most efficient answer, but I managed by using App credentials to authenticate my login, but instead of passing it through requests, I had it go through a WebWidget to emulate a browser in which the URL would include the code or token, close the window after retrieving the value and use it to create the facebook graph and run it like normal.

facebookGraph = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token=accessToken["access_token"], version=2.7)
facebookGraph.put_object(parent_object='me', connection_name='feed', message='Hello, world')

Unfortunately it does have to go through a pseudo browser.

I haven't tried this yet but,

On the other hand, if theres a user already logged in, you could check cookies if a user is already logged in and exchange the code for an access token and just do a browser login if theres none. This way the webwidget doesnt need to popup every time the program is run.