Facebook Business SDK
Project description
Facebook Business SDK for Python
Introduction
The Facebook Business SDK is a one-stop-shop to help our partners better serve their businesses. Partners are using multiple Facebook API's to serve the needs of their clients. Adopting all these API's and keeping them up to date across the various platforms can be time consuming and ultimately prohibitive. For this reason Facebook has developed the Business SDK bundling many of its APIs into one SDK to ease implementation and upkeep. The Business SDK is an upgraded version of the Marketing API SDK that includes the Marketing API as well as many Facebook APIs from different platforms such as Pages, Business Manager, Instagram, etc.
Quick Start
Business SDK Getting Started Guide
Python is currently the most popular language for our third-party developers. facebook_business
is a Python package that provides an interface between your Python application and Facebook's APIs within the Business SDK. This tutorial covers the basic knowledge needed to use the SDK and provides some exercises for the reader.
NOTE: facebook_business
package is compatible with Python 2 and 3!
Pre-requisites
Register An App
To get started with the SDK, you must have an app registered on developers.facebook.com.
To manage the Marketing API, please visit your App Dashboard and add the Marketing API product to your app.
IMPORTANT: For security, it is recommended that you turn on 'App Secret Proof for Server API calls' in your app's Settings->Advanced page.
Obtain An Access Token
When someone connects with an app using Facebook Login and approves the request for permissions, the app obtains an access token that provides temporary, secure access to Facebook APIs.
An access token is an opaque string that identifies a User, app, or Page.
For example, to access the Marketing API, you need to generate a user access token
for your app and ask for the ads_management
permission; to access Pages API,
you need to generate a Page access token for your app and ask for the manage_page
permission.
Refer to our Access Token Guide to learn more.
For now, we can use the Graph Explorer to get an access token.
Install package
The easiest way to install the SDK is via pip
in your shell.
NOTE: For Python 3, use pip3
and python3
instead.
NOTE: Use sudo
if any of these complain about permissions. (This might
happen if you are using a system installed Python.)
If you don't have pip:
easy_install pip
Now execute when you have pip:
pip install facebook_business
If you care for the latest version instead of a possibly outdated version in the pypi.python.org repository, check out the repository from GitHub or download a release tarball. Once you've got the package downloaded and unzipped, install it:
python setup.py install
Great, now you are ready to use the SDK!
Bootstrapping
Create test.py
Create a test.py file with the contents below (assuming your system is using python 2.7 and installed under /opt/homebrew. Update to your proper python location.):
import sys
sys.path.append('/opt/homebrew/lib/python2.7/site-packages') # Replace this with the place you installed facebookads using pip
sys.path.append('/opt/homebrew/lib/python2.7/site-packages/facebook_business-3.0.0-py2.7.egg-info') # same as above
from facebook_business.api import FacebookAdsApi
from facebook_business.adobjects.adaccount import AdAccount
my_app_id = 'your-app-id'
my_app_secret = 'your-appsecret'
my_access_token = 'your-page-access-token'
FacebookAdsApi.init(my_app_id, my_app_secret, my_access_token)
my_account = AdAccount('act_<your-adaccount-id>')
campaigns = my_account.get_campaigns()
print(campaigns)
Test Your Install
Test your install with the following command:
python test.py
You should see the result in your terminal window. If it complains about an expired token, repeat the process for requesting a Page Access Token described in the prerequisites section above.
NOTE: We shall use the objects module throughout the rest of the tutorial. You can also use the individual class files under adobjects directly.
Understanding CRUD
The SDK implements a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) design. Objects relevant to exploring the graph are located in the objects module of the facebook_business package.
All objects on the graph are instances of AbstractObject
. Some objects can
be directly queried and thus are instances of AbstractCrudObject
(a subclass
of AbstractObject
). Both these abstract classes are located in
facebook_business.adobjects
.
There is and additional folder adobjects
under facebook_business. Under this you will see a file for every ad object
in our Marketing API. These files are autogenerated from our API and therefore
are close in parity with what API has to offer. Based on what CRUD operations can be
performed on each object, you will see the presence of the following methods in them:
api_get
api_update
api_delete
create_xxx
get_xxx
For example, Campaign has all these methods but AdAccount does not. Read the Marketing API documentation for more information about how different ad objects are used.
There are some deprecated function in AbstractCrudObject
, like
remote_create
remote_read
remote_update
remote_delete
Please try to stop use them since we may plan to deprecated them soon.
Exploring the Graph
The way the SDK abstracts the API is by defining classes that represent objects
on the graph. These class definitions and their helpers are located in
facebook_business.adobjects
.
Initializing Objects
Look at AbstractObject
's and AbstractCrudObject
's __init__
method
for more information. Most objects on the graph subclass from one of the two.
When instantiating an ad object, you can specify its id if it already exists by
defining fbid
argument. Also, if you want to interact with the
API using a specific api object instead of the default, you can specify the
api
argument.
Edges
Look at the methods of an object to see what associations over which we can
iterate. For example an User
object has a method get_ad_accounts
which
returns an iterator of AdAccount
objects.
Ad Account
Most ad-related operations are in the context of an ad account. You can go to Ads Manager to see accounts for which you have permission. Most of you probably have a personal account.
Let's get all the ad accounts for the user with the given access token. I only have one account so the following is printed:
>>> from facebook_business.adobjects.user import User
>>> me = adobjects.User(fbid='me')
>>> my_accounts = list(me.get_ad_accounts())
>>> print(my_accounts)
[{ 'account_id': u'17842443', 'id': u'act_17842443'}]
>>> type(my_accounts[0])
<class 'facebook_business.adobjects.AdAccount'>
WARNING: We do not specify a keyword argument api=api
when instantiating
the User
object here because we've already set the default api when
bootstrapping.
NOTE: We wrap the return value of get_ad_accounts
with list()
because get_ad_accounts
returns an EdgeIterator
object (located in
facebook_business.adobjects
) and we want to get the full list right away instead of
having the iterator lazily loading accounts.
For our purposes, we can just pick an account and do our experiments in its context:
>>> my_account = my_accounts[0]
Or if you already know your account id:
>>> my_account = adobjects.AdAccount('act_17842443')
Create
Let's create a campaign. It's in the context of the account, i.e. its parent should be the account.
fields = [
]
params = {
adobjects.Campaign.Field.name : 'Conversions Campaign',
adobjects.Campaign.Field.configured_status: adobjects.Campaign.Status.paused,
}
campaign = AdAccount(id).create_campaign(fields, params)
Then we specify some details about the campaign. To figure out what properties
to define, you should look at the available fields of the object (located in
Campaign.Field
) and also look at the ad object's documentation (e.g.
Campaign).
NOTE: To find out the fields, look at the individual class file under adobjects directory.
If there's an error, an exception will be raised. Possible exceptions and their
descriptions are listed in facebook_business.exceptions
.
Read
We can also read properties of an object from the api assuming that the object
is already created and has a node path. Accessing properties of an object is
simple since AbstractObject
implements the collections.MutableMapping
.
You can access them just like accessing a key of a dictionary:
>>> print(my_account)
{'account_id': u'17842443', 'id': u'act_17842443'}
>>> my_account = my_account.api_get(fields=[adobjects.AdAccount.Field.amount_spent])
>>> print(my_account[adobjects.AdAccount.Field.amount_spent])
{'amount_spent': 21167, 'account_id': u'17842443', 'id': u'act_17842443'}
Update
To update an object, we can modify its properties and then call the
api_update
method to sync the object with the server. Let's correct the
typo "Campain" to "Campaign":
>>> campaign.api_update(fields=[], params={adobjects.Campaign.Field.name:"Potato Campaign"})
You can see the results in ads manager.
Delete
If we decide we don't want the campaign we created anymore:
campaign.api_delete()
Useful Arguments
MULTIPLE ACCESS TOKENS
Throughout the docs, the method FacebookAdsApi.init is called before making any API calls. This method set up a default FacebookAdsApi object to be used everywhere. That simplifies the usage but it's not feasible when a system using the SDK will make calls on behalf of multiple users.
The reason why this is not feasible is because each user should have its own FacebookSession, with its own access token, rather than using the same session for every one. Each session should be used to create a separate FacebookAdsApi object. See example below:
my_app_id = '<APP_ID>'
my_app_secret = '<APP_SECRET>'
my_access_token_1 = '<ACCESS_TOKEN_1>'
my_access_token_2 = '<ACCESS_TOKEN_2>'
proxies = {'http': '<HTTP_PROXY>', 'https': '<HTTPS_PROXY>'} # add proxies if needed
session1 = FacebookSession(
my_app_id,
my_app_secret,
my_access_token_1,
proxies,
)
session2 = FacebookSession(
my_app_id,
my_app_secret,
my_access_token_2,
proxies,
)
api1 = FacebookAdsApi(session1)
api2 = FacebookAdsApi(session2)
In the SDK examples, we always set a single FacebookAdsApi object as the default one. However, working with multiples access_tokens, require us to use multiples apis. We may set a default api for a user, but, for the other users, we shall use its the api object as a param. In the example below, we create two AdUsers, the first one using the default api and the second one using its api object:
FacebookAdsApi.set_default_api(api1)
me1 = AdUser(fbid='me')
me2 = AdUser(fbid='me', api=api2)
Another way to create the same objects from above would be:
me1 = AdUser(fbid='me', api=api1)
me2 = AdUser(fbid='me', api=api2)
From here, all the following workflow for these objects remains the same. The only exceptions are the classmethods calls, where we now should pass the api we want to use as the last parameter on every call. For instance, a call to the Aduser.get_by_ids method should be like this:
session = FacebookSession(
my_app_id,
my_app_secret,
my_access_token_1,
proxies,
)
api = FacebookAdsApi(session1)
Aduser.get_by_ids(ids=['<UID_1>', '<UID_2>'], api=api)
CRUD
All CRUD calls support a params
keyword argument which takes a dictionary
mapping parameter names to values in case advanced modification is required. You
can find the list of parameter names as attributes of
{your object class}.Field
. Under the Field class there may be other classes
which contain, as attributes, valid fields of the value of one of the parent
properties.
api_update
and create_xxx
support a files
keyword argument
which takes a dictionary mapping file reference names to binary opened file
objects.
api_get
supports a fields
keyword argument which is a convenient way
of specifying the 'fields' parameter. fields
takes a list of fields which
should be read during the call. The valid fields can be found as attributes of
the class Field.
Edges
When initializing an EdgeIterator
or when calling a method such as
AdAccount.get_ad_campaigns
:
- You can specify a
fields
argument which takes a list of fields to read for the objects being read. - You can specify a
params
argument that can help you specify or filter the edge more precisely.
Batch Calling
It is efficient to group together large numbers of calls into one http request.
The SDK makes this process simple. You can group together calls into an instance
of FacebookAdsApiBatch
(available in facebook_business.api). To easily get one
for your api instance:
my_api_batch = api.new_batch()
Calls can be added to the batch instead of being executed immediately:
campaign.api_delete(batch=my_api_batch)
Once you're finished adding calls to the batch, you can send off the request:
my_api_batch.execute()
Please follow batch call guidelines in the Marketing API documentation. There are optimal numbers of calls per batch. In addition, you may need to watch out that for rate limiting as a batch call simply improves network performance and each call does count individually towards rate limiting.
Exceptions
See facebook_business.exceptions
for a list of exceptions which may be thrown by
the SDK.
Tests
Unit tests
The unit tests don't require an access token or network access. Run them with your default installed Python as follows:
python -m facebook_business.test.unit
You can also use tox to run the unit tests with multiple Python versions:
sudo apt-get install python-tox # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo yum install python-tox # Fedora
tox --skip-missing-interpreters
You can increase interpreter coverage by installing additional versions of
Python. On Ubuntu you can use the
deadsnakes PPA.
On other distributions you can
build from source and then use
sudo make altinstall
to avoid conflicts with your system-installed
version.
Examples
Examples of usage are located in the examples/
folder.
Debug
If this SDK is not working as expected, it may be either a SDK issue or API issue.
This can be identified by constructing a raw cURL request and seeing if the response is as expected
for example:
from facebook_business.adobjects.page import Page
from facebook_business.api import FacebookAdsApi
FacebookAdsApi.init(access_token=access_token, debug=True)
page = Page(page_id).api_get(fields=fields,params=params)
When running this code, this cURL request will be printed to the console as:
curl -X 'GET' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'User-Agent: fbbizsdk-python-v3.3.1' 'https://graph.facebook.com/v3.3/<pageid>/?access_token=<access_token>&fields=name%2Cbirthday%2Cphone'
SDK Codegen
Our SDK is autogenerated from SDK Codegen. If you want to learn more about how our SDK code is generated, please check this repository.
Issue
Since we want to handle bugs more efficiently, we've decided to close issue reporting in Github and move to our dedicated bug reporting channel. If you encounter a bug with Business SDK (Python), please report the issue at our developer bug reporting channel.
License
Facebook Business SDK for Python is licensed under the LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
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