Getting Started

The Facebook Graph API

The product team at your startup decided that they would like your users to connect their Facebook accounts and integrate their Facebook data with your service or application.

Or you may have been contracted to create a dashboard for visualizing Facebook ad campaign metrics. Or perhaps it’s finally time to build that automated solution for posting content for the Instagram Business accounts that you manage.

If you find yourself in any of these situations (or a host of other similar business problems), you are going to need the Facebook Graph API. If you’re looking to get your feet wet, play around in a sandbox, and build your familiarity and confidence, you have come to the right place.

What will this course cover?

We will go through all the steps needed to begin sending requests to the Facebook Graph API in order for you to retrieve Facebook data on behalf of your users.

First, let’s discuss the following basic concepts of the Facebook Graph API.

• Facebook Graph API overview
• Authentication and Facebook Login
• Authorization and access tokens

Towards the end of the course, we will build our mini-project step by step.

• Set up a Facebook “App” to get a client/secret key for accessing the API.
• Deploy a web page with a “Facebook Login” button, which your users will use to give your web application access to their data.
• Go through the “Facebook Login” authorization flow as if you were a user.
• Obtain the short-lived access token after completing the authorization flow.
• Send a request to the API to exchange the short-lived access token for a long-lived access token.
• Use the long-lived access token to demonstrate various requests to the API.

Who is this course for?

This course is for developers who have some basic experience working with APIs and are looking to start using Facebook’s Graph API for programmatic access. You should also be comfortable working in HTML and Javascript.

That being said, you don’t need to be an API expert. If you know what it means to “send a POST request with a JSON body”, you are already ahead of the game! If not, don’t worry. We will revisit how to send GET and POST requests.

Learning objective

After you have taken this course, you will have everything you need to progress further. You will be able to explore the entire API freely (it’s pretty massive!), and you will have the foundation to build API integrations into your own projects.