Funky

Funky is a Ruby library to fetch data about videos posted on Facebook, such as their title, description, number of views, comments, shares, and likes.

How it works

Funky can get public Facebook video data whether the Graph API requires insight permission or not. For example, even though the number of shares and views are shown publicly on the web page, the Graph API will not return those results unless the user has insight permission for that video. Using Funky, you can obtain the number of shares and views without insight permissions.

Under the hood, Funky hits Facebook's APIs on some cases, while other cases it will scrape Facebook's HTML to get the data. It's kind of... funky.

Usage

This is still a very early version, and it currently can only retrieve certain Facebook video data.

Installing and Configuring Funky

First, add funky to your Gemfile:

gem 'funky'

Then run bundle install.

Funky will require an App ID and an App Secret which you can obtain after registering as a developer on Facebook for developers.

There are two ways to configure Funky with your App ID and App Secret:

1. By default, Funky will look for the environment variables called FB_APP_ID and FB_APP_SECRET. You can put those keys in your .bash_profile and Funky will work.

   export FB_APP_ID="YourAppID"
   export FB_APP_SECRET="YourAppSecret"
   

2. If you're using this in Rails, you can choose to create an initializer instead and configure the App ID and App Secret like so:

   Funky.configure do |config|
     config.app_id = 'YourAppID'
     config.app_secret = 'YourAppSecret'
   end

API Overview

Funky consists of 2 different surface APIs - one to fetch video data from Facebook and one to fetch page data from Facebook.

Pages API

Use #where clause to get an array of pages

ids = ['1487249874853741', '526533744142224']
pages = Funky::Page.where(id: ids)
pages.first.id            # => '1487249874853741'
pages.first.name          # => 'Sony Pictures'
pages.first.username      # => 'SonyPicturesGlobal'

Use #posts to get an array of posts

page = Funky::Page.find('FullscreenInc')
posts = page.posts
posts.first.type          # => 'video'

Videos API

Use #where clause to get an array of videos

ids = ['10154439119663508', '10153834590672139']
videos = Funky::Video.where(id: ids)
videos.first.id            # => '10154439119663508'
videos.first.created_time  # => #<DateTime: 2015-12-17T06:29:48+00:00>
videos.first.description   # => "Hugh Jackman coaches Great Britain's..."
videos.first.length        # => 147.05
videos.first.picture       # => "https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/..."
videos.first.page_name     # => "Moviefone"

If a non-existing video ID is passed into the where clause, it is ignored. Other video IDs will still be retrieved.

ids = ['10154439119663508', '10153834590672139', 'doesnotexist']
videos = Funky::Video.where(id: ids)
videos.count    # => 2
videos.first.id # => '10154439119663508'
videos.last.id  # => '10153834590672139'

Use #find to get a single video

video = Funky::Video.find('10154439119663508')
video.id            # => '10154439119663508'
video.like_count    # => 1169
video.comment_count # => 65
video.share_count   # => 348
video.view_count    # => 10121

If a non-existing video ID is passed into #find, Funky::ContentNotFound will be raised.

Funky::Video.find('doesnotexist') # => raises Funky::ContentNotFound

Use #find_by_url!(url) to get a single video from a url

video = Funky::Video.find_by_url!('https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10154439119663508')
video.id            # => '10154439119663508'
video.like_count    # => 1169
video.comment_count # => 65
video.share_count   # => 348
video.view_count    # => 10121

If a non-existing video url is passed into #find_by_url!, Funky::ContentNotFound will be raised.

Funky::Video.find_by_url!('https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=doesnotexist')
  # => raises Funky::ContentNotFound

The current URL formats are supported:

• https://www.facebook.com/{page_name}/videos/vb.{alt_page_id}/{video_id}
• https://www.facebook.com/{page_name}/videos/{video_id}
• https://www.facebook.com/{page_id}/videos/{video_id}
• https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v={video_id}

Connection error

Should there be a case where Funky is unable to connect to Facebook, Funky::ConnectionError will be raised.

# Given funky is unable to establish a connection to Facebook
Funky::Video.find('10154439119663508') # => raises Funky::ConnectionError
Funky::Video.where(id: '10154439119663508') # => raises Funky::ConnectionError

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/fullscreen/funky. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.