fbpages-telegram-bot (Archived)

This project is archived and no longer functional. See Why is this archived? below.

A bot that forwarded Facebook page updates to a Telegram channel.

Written in Python, it used python-telegram-bot for the Telegram Bot API and facebook-sdk for the Facebook Graph API.

Why is this archived?

This bot was built in 2017 targeting Python 3.6, Facebook Graph API v2.7, and libraries that have since been abandoned or undergone breaking rewrites. It is no longer functional for the following reasons:

Facebook API access is effectively dead for this use case

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook (now Meta) drastically restricted its Graph API:

• Graph API v2.7 (used by this bot) was shut down long ago. The current version is v22+.
• Reading posts from pages you don't manage now requires Business Verification and App Review approval for the "Page Public Content Access" feature. Meta routinely denies hobbyist and personal projects.
• Reading posts from pages you do manage is still possible with a Page Access Token, but requires periodic token refresh (~60 days).

In short, the simple "create an app, get a token, read any public page" workflow this bot relied on no longer exists.

Outdated dependencies

Dependency	Issue
facebook-sdk	Last released in 2018. Unmaintained.
youtube-dl	Abandoned/DMCA'd. Superseded by yt-dlp.
python-telegram-bot	The bot uses the old synchronous API (v12/v13). v20+ is fully async with a completely different API surface.

Code-level issues

• Excessive use of global variables instead of proper encapsulation
• Uses configparser.SafeConfigParser (removed in Python 3.12)
• Uses print() instead of the logging module throughout
• Several bugs (undefined variables in error paths, dead code)
• Telegram caption limit hardcoded to 200 characters (now 1024)

Original setup instructions (for reference only)

Click to expand

Preparatory Setup

fbpages-telegram-bot used Python 3 (developed and tested with version 3.6.0).

Required packages:

• python-telegram-bot
• facebook-sdk
• youtube-dl

Installed with:

pip3 install python-telegram-bot, facebook-sdk, youtube-dl

Bot Setup

1. Message @BotFather on Telegram to create a new bot and get its token.
2. Start a conversation with your new bot and send any message to it. You can go to https://api.telegram.org/bot<BOTID>/getUpdates to find your user_id or chat_id to use in the settings file.
3. Add your newly created bot as an administrator of the channel that will receive the posts.
4. Create a Facebook App and then go to the Graph API Explorer. Choose your new app in the top right corner, and then click on Get Token, Get App Token. The Access Token field will now have the token required for the Facebook section of the settings file.
5. Clone the repository with git clone https://github.com/s1cp/fbpages-telegram-bot.git
6. Enter the new directory with cd fbpages-telegram-bot
7. Set the appropriate values in a file called botsettings.ini. Use example.botsettings.ini as an example with cp example.botsettings.ini botsettings.ini && nano botsettings.ini.
8. Run the bot with python3 facebook2telegram.py

Bot configuration values

Facebook section

Name	Description
locale	Facebook locale. Format example: en-US
token	Facebook Graph API token.
pages	List of page IDs. Format example: ['123456789',pageusername']
refreshrate	Time interval between every Facebook check, in seconds.
status	Allow status posts. Format: True or False
photo	Allow photo posts. Format: True or False
video	Allow video posts. Format: True or False
link	Allow link posts. Format: True or False
shared	Allow shared posts. Format: True or False
message	Allow message in posts. Format: True or False

Telegram section

Name	Description
token	Telegram Bot API token.
channel	Username of the channel that will receive the posts
admin	Optional. Bot creator's ID to receive the bot's status.

License

MIT