I am creating long lived access tokens for my users when they first sign up for my app, this has been working fine for the past 6-8 months. Recently, the manage_pages permission was revoked from my app (when Graph API v8.0 was released) due to lack of use. It is true that we did not use this permission, but the reason we asked for it is because it was required for some of the calls we were doing to gather Instagram insights for our users when we first started. I don't know if this has anything to do with the issue but just including it anyways.
Now it seems that newly created access tokens are automatically invalid, this was never the case before. I run these access tokens through the access token debugger and get the following error:
Error validating access token: The user has not authorized application [MY_APP_ID].
It seems this problem slowly began to onset, and now every single new user on our app is experiencing this issue, even after granting us the following permissions:
public_profile
email
instagram_basic
instagram_manage_insights
pages_show_list
The permissions recently revoked from my app were:
pages_manage_ads
pages_read_user_content
pages_manage_metadata
Users go through the complete OAUTH flow, and when they are redirected to my site I create a long-lived access token but it seems the token does not recognize that the user had authorized my app, hence the reason it is invalid.
Here is my OAUTH Url for new users:
https://www.facebook.com/v5.0/dialog/oauth?client_id={{ settings.FACEBOOK_CLIENT_ID }}&redirect_uri={{ settings.FACEBOOK_REDIRECT_URL }}&state={{MY_STATE}}&return_scopes=true&auth_type=rerequest&scope=public_profile,email,instagram_basic,instagram_manage_insights,pages_show_list
You have to remove the manage_pages scope from your Facebook button code and replace it with the pages_show_list scope :)
I want my application to post to a single, pre-defined user's wall something like "We just posted a new blog at [URL]" with no client-side interaction.
But every answer I can find on this topic seems to hinge on getting an access token through
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token
Which gives you some redirect url through which a user has to log in manually.
I've got near zero experience with Facebook. Is it possible to automatically get an access token for a predefined user? Am I doing it wrong? ;)
You can't.
Facebook doesn't give you a way to automatically get an access token for a user. That user needs to log into Facebook and explicitly give your app permission. The best you can get is a long-lived access token that remains valid for up to 60 days.
Getting that token requires a two step process:
1) Logging into Facebook using either the JavaScript API or redirecting the user to a valid Facebook login URL.
2) Retrieving the short-lived access token you got in step 1 for a long-lived access token.
Once you've got that access token, should your post fail, you know you need to re-authenticate the user and get a new long-lived access token. Your user needs to be online and logged into Facebook for this to work, though it can happen without their interaction.
I have written an application to manage a user's Facebook notifications. The app requests offline_access as well as manage notifications permissions. My logs have been filling up with Facebook errors. I understand that when a users changes their password the token is going to expire, but what I don't understand is why I am getting these errors:
Facebook Error: Error validating access token: Session has expired at unix time 1320012000. The current unix time is 1320191317.
Facebook Error: (#200) The "manage_notifications" permission is required in order to query the user's notifications.
They are occurring way too often to be users just rejecting the permissions and the access tokens that are expiring have expirations of 0.
I want the users of my website to be able to authorize Facebook access in their profiles, such that our servers can continuously use that authorization. I know how to do the authorization part, but what I get back is an access key that will eventually expire. This would require the user to log back in and re-authorize us periodically.
Is there a way that the user can grant authorization once, giving me an access key that won't expire?
Update
The offline_access is now disabled as pointed out in one of the comments. To understand the changes Facebook as a nice post. https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/
Old Answer
If the application has not requested offline_access permission, the access token is time-bounded. Time-bounded access token also get invalidated when the user logs out of Facebook. If the application has obtained offline_access permission from the user, the access token does not have an expiry. However it gets invalidated whenever the user changes his/her password.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
I am playing around with the Oauth 2.0 authorization in Facebook and was wondering if the access tokens Facebook passes out ever expire. If so, is there a way to request a long-life access token?
After digging around a bit, i found this. It seems to be the answer:
Updated (11/April/2018)
The token will expire after about 60 days.
The token will be refreshed once per day, for up to 90 days, when the person using your app makes a request to Facebook's servers.
All access tokens need to be renewed every 90 days with the consent of the person using your app.
Facebook change announce (10/04/2018)
Facebook updated token expiration page (10/04/2018)
offline_access:
Enables your application to perform authorized requests on behalf of the user at any time. By default, most access tokens expire after a short time period to ensure applications only make requests on behalf of the user when the are actively using the application. This permission makes the access token returned by our OAuth endpoint long-lived.
Its a permission value requested.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions
UPDATE
offline_access permission has been removed a while ago.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/roadmap/completed-changes/offline-access-removal/
Try this may be it will help full for you
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?
client_id=127605460617602&
scope=offline_access,read_stream,user_photos,user_videos,publish_stream&
redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/
To get lifetime Access Token you have to use scope=offline_access
Meaning of scope=offline_access is that :-
Enables your application to perform authorized requests on behalf of
the user at any time. By default, most access tokens expire after a
short time period to ensure applications only make requests on behalf
of the user when the are actively using the application. This
permission makes the access token returned by our OAuth endpoint
long-lived.
But according to facebook future upgradation the offline_acees functionality will be deprecated for forever from the 3rd October, 2012.
and the user will be given 60 days long-lived access token and before expiration of the access token Facebook will notify or you can get your custom notification functionality fetching the expiration value from the Facebook Api..
Note that Facebook is now deprecating the offline_access permission in favor of tokens for which you can request an "upgrade" to the expiry. I'm just now dealing with this, myself, so I don't have much more to say, but this doc may help:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/offline-access-deprecation/
I came here with the same question as the OP, but the answers suggesting the use of offline_access are raising red flags for me.
Security-wise, getting offline access to a user's Facebook account is qualitatively different and far more powerful than just using Facebook for single sign on, and should not be used lightly (unless you really need it). When a user grants this permission, "the application" can examine the user's account from anywhere at any time. I put "the application" in quotes because it's actually any tool that has the credentials -- you could script up a whole suite of tools that have nothing to do with the web server that can access whatever info the user has agreed to share to those credentials.
I would not use this feature to work around a short token lifetime; that's not its intended purpose. Indeed, token lifetime itself is a security feature. I'm still looking for details about the proper usage of these tokens (Can I persist them? How do/should I secure them? Does Facebook embed the OAuth 2.0 "refresh token" inside the main one? If not, where is it and/or how do I refresh?), but I'm pretty sure offline_access isn't the right way.
Yes, they do expire. There is an 'expires' value that is passed along with the 'access_token', and from what I can tell it's about 2 hours. I've been searching, but I don't see a way to request a longer expiration time.
since i had the same problem - see the excellent post on this topic from ben biddington, who clarified all this issues with the wrong token and the right type to send for the requests.
http://benbiddington.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/facebook-graph-api-getting-access-tokens/
You can always refresh the user's access token every time the user logs into your site through facebook.
The offline access can't guarantee you get a life-long time access token, the access token changes whenever the user revoke you application access or the user changes his/her password.
Quoted from facebook http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
Note: If the application has not requested offline_access permission, the access token is time-bounded. Time-bounded access token also get invalidated when the user logs out of Facebook. If the application has obtained offline_access permission from the user, the access token does not have an expiry. However it gets invalidated whenever the user changes his/her password.
Assume you store the user's facebook uid and access token in a users table in your database,every time the user clicks on the "Login with facebook" button, you check the login statususing facebook Javascript API, and then examine the connection status from the response,if the user has connected to your site, you can then update the access token in the table.
Hit this to exchange a short living access token for a long living/non expiring(pages) one:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
client_id=APP_ID&
client_secret=APP_SECRET&
grant_type=fb_exchange_token&
fb_exchange_token=EXISTING_ACCESS_TOKEN
log into facebook account and edit your application settings(account -> application setting ->additional permission of the application which use your account). uncheck the permission (Access my data when I'm not using the application(offline_access)). Then face will book issue a new token when you log in to the application.
Basic the facebook token expires about in a hour. But you can using 'exchange' token to get a long-lived token
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens
GET /oauth/access_token?
grant_type=fb_exchange_token&
client_id={app-id}&
client_secret={app-secret}&
fb_exchange_token={short-lived-token}
This is a fair few years later, but the Facebook Graph API Explorer now has a little info symbol next to the access token that allows you to access the access token tool app, and extend the API token for a couple of months. Might be helpful during development.
check the following things when you interact with facebook graph api.
1) Application connect URL should be the base of your "redirect_uri"
connect URL:- www.x-minds.org/fb/connect/
redirect_uri - www.x-minds.org/fb/connect/redirect
2) Your "redirect_uri" should be same in the both case (when you request for a verification code and request for an access_token)
redirect_uri - www.x-minds.org/fb/connect/redirect
3) you should encode the the argument when you request for an access_token
4) shouldn't pass the argument (type=client_cred) when you request for an access_token. the authorization server will issue a token without session part. we can't use this token with "me" alias in graph api. This token will have length of (40) but a token with session part will have a length of(81).
An access token without session part will work with some cases
eg: -https://graph.facebook.com/?access_token=116122545078207|EyWJJYqrdgQgV1bfueck320z7MM.
But Graph API with "me" alias will work with only token with session part.
I don't know when exactly the tokens expire, but they do, otherwise there wouldn't be an option to give offline permissions.
Anyway, sometimes requiring the user to give offline permissions is an overkill. Depending on your needs, maybe it's enough that the token remains valid as long as the website is opened in the user's browser. For this there may be a simpler solution - relogging the user in periodically using an iframe: facebook auto re-login from cookie php
Worked for me...