About

This is a basic wrapper to the Facebook API, designed to work with Connect and Express in a simple and straightforward manner. I will hopefully add more features and make it more robust in time. I will gladly accept contributions.

It was written from scratch, partly inspired by the PHP Facebook API wrapper written by the developers at Heroku.

The available Node.js modules for Facebook use other oauth modules that do not work well with a Facebook Application, the main reason I wrote this. For instance, the redirect is not made with a js script, resulting in an ugly link in the app canvas. They also seem unnecessarily complex when all we need is a simple set of functions.

Installing

Install via npm:

npm install facebook-wrapper

How to use

If using the Connect or Express frameworks, all that needs to be done is add an authentication function in the server flow. After this function, the request object will contain an object with a couple of API functions to interact with the Graph API and FQL. The access_token is provided automatically.

Authentication

You must include the cookieParser() and session() before the facebook.auth function, as it uses sessions to prevent a CSRF attack.

For now, the access_token and other data are not kept in the session variables, for simplicity and redundancy (a good thing in some cases on Facebook).

Also, Facebook now requires all apps to parse the signed_request, so another important middleware to add before facebook.auth is the bodyParser.

var facebook = require('../lib/facebook-wrapper');
var express = require('express');
var options = {
	app_id: "YOUR APP ID",
	app_secret: "YOUR APP PRIVATE KEY",
	redirect_uri: "YOUR APP URL"
};

var server = express.createServer(
	express.logger(),
	express.bodyParser(),
	express.cookieParser(),
	express.session({ secret: 'secret123' }),
	facebook.auth(options)
);

Wrapper object

After the user has successfully authenticated, the request object will have a "facebook" object.

Currently it has only 2 methods: graph and fql. They can be used given a string just like using the Graph API explorer or the FQL web interface.

server.post('/*', function (req, res) {
	res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
	req.facebook.graph('/me?fields=id', function (id) {
		id = id.id;
		req.facebook.fql('select name, pic_small from user where uid=me()', function (data) {
			data = data[0];
			res.end('Hello, ' + data.name + ' (' + id + '). Have a picture of yourself: <img src=\"' + data.pic_small + '\" />');
		});
	});
});
server.listen(8000);

Licence

Copyright (C) 2011 Vlad Bagrin

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.