lex-2008 / facebook2email

Forward posts from selected groups to your email

Facebook2email

Forwards posts in selected groups to your email. Uses undetected-chromedriver (in docker). Inspired by Facebook-Scraper-Bot-And-Forwarder.

Features

• Uses permanent Chrome profile, in which you can login to Facebook to give script access to private groups (although this can be changed, ofc)
• Sends text of new posts by email
• Optionally with post screenshots
• Is expected to be driven by cron (doesn't have its own task scheduler - is it a feature or lack of feature?)

Requirements

Docker on x86 machine with enough RAM to run Chrome and open Facebook (I use 2GB VPS). I assume Linux, but you might succeed on other platforms.

Installation

Clone this repo and run:

docker pull ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver

Configuration

Copy config.ini-example to config.ini, edit it to your liking. You will need to change at least mail_to (set it to your email address), maybe smtp_server (unless you're using gmail), and provide group IDs in facebook_group parameters in each section. You can have any number of section, their names ([one] and [two] in example config) don't matter.

Worth noting that script iterates over all sections in this file (except [global] and [DEFAULT]), opens facebook group mentioned in each of them, and checks it for updates. [DEFAULT] section provides default values for settings in other sections, and other sections can override them, like it's done for mail_subject and screenshots in example config. It means that this script can check any number of facebook groups, and send results to different email addresses, if desired.

Sending emails to multiple addresses, or using encrypted connection to SMTP server is not implemented yet.

Usage

Manually

In order to view private groups, you need to login to Facebook.

If your Docker is modern enough, run this command:

docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/data -p 5900:5900 --shm-size=2g ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver bash

If your Docker is so old that it doesn't have --shm-size argument, use df to find your shared memory partition (/dev/shm, /tmp/shm, /run/shm, or something like this) and run it like this:

docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/data -p 5900:5900 -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver bash

Otherwise, docker creates only 64Mb of shared memory partition in the container, and Chrome crashes on Facebook.

In bash prompt, type this:

x11vnc & python

It will start VNC server and open Python for you. x11vnc will send output to same terminal as where Python is running, so hit Enter few times to see the Python prompt.

If you use proxy server to connect to Facebook, type this in Python prompt (replace socks5://localhost:1234 with your actual proxy server):

import undetected_chromedriver as uc
chrome_options = uc.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--proxy-server=socks5://localhost:1234')
driver = uc.Chrome(options=chrome_options, advanced_elements=True, user_data_dir='/data/profile')

Otherwise, type this:

import undetected_chromedriver as uc
driver = uc.Chrome(advanced_elements=True, user_data_dir='/data/profile')

You can adjust other arguments to uc.Chrome to your liking, for example remove user_data_dir to use a temporary profile, or add some other undetected-chromedriver arguments.

After that, use your favourite VNC viewer to connect to the machine you're running docker on (localhost if you're running it on your local machine), port 5900. You will see a chrome running.

You can use it normally and drive from command line at the same time!

Useful command: driver.current_url to get current URL, if your VNC client doesn't support copy-pasting.

After you're done, quit Python and Docker container by Ctrl+D.

Automatically (using this script)

Add this command to your crontab:

docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/data --shm-size=2g ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver /data/script.py >last.log 2>&1

Replacing ${PWD} with path to this repo (it must contain script.py file). If your Docker is too old and doesn't support --shm-size argument, replace it with -v ...:/dev/shm, like shown earlier:

docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/data -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver /data/script.py >last.log 2>&1

It will visit groups enumerated in your config.ini file, scroll a page once (so more than one post gets loaded), and check for new posts. All seen posts are saved to posts subdir in data dir, and an email is sent for each group containing new posts.

facebook2email's Issues

starting as a cron job?

Trying to build a way to recover as a service. Doesn't seem to wait the way I'm expecting for the driver load and since I'm basing it on your code, do you have any suggestions?

#!/bin/bash

IMAGE_NAME="ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver"

# Find running containers matching the image name
CONTAINERS=$(docker ps -a --format '{{.ID}} {{.Image}}' | grep $IMAGE_NAME | awk '{print $1}')

if [ -z "$CONTAINERS" ]; then
    echo "No running containers found for $IMAGE_NAME"
else
    echo "Stopping running containers for $IMAGE_NAME..."
    # Stop each container one by one
    for CONTAINER in $CONTAINERS; do
        docker stop $CONTAINER
        echo "Container $CONTAINER stopped."
    done
fi

docker run --rm -d -v /opt/brgc/facebook2email:/data -p 5900:5900 --shm-size=2g ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver bash -c 'x11vnc >x11vnc.log 2>&1 & sleep 5 && python -c "import undetected_chromedriver as uc; driver = uc.Chrome(advanced_elements=True, user_data_dir='/data/profile')" && sleep 5'

docker run --rm -v /opt/brgc/facebook2email:/data --shm-size=2g ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver /data/scriptmg2.py
#>last.log 2>&1

new config, issues startin

Hey there,
I'm really liking the look of your code, I need something like this for scraping a club facebook and posting to our website for group posts. I would appreciate any suggestions you could make to get this to work.

I installed and had issues getting vnc to connect, it won't accept connections.

I tried running without that step but get the below when trying the cron job
docker run --rm -v /opt/brgc/facebook2email:/data --shm-size=2g ultrafunk/undetected-chromedriver /data/script.py

running keepUpScreen() sleeping starting opening sleeping working working on 28 posts Traceback (most recent call last): File "/data/script.py", line 54, in <module> post_urls = [x.attrs['href'].split('?')[0] for x in post_links if '/permalink/' in x.attrs['href']] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/data/script.py", line 54, in <listcomp> post_urls = [x.attrs['href'].split('?')[0] for x in post_links if '/permalink/' in x.attrs['href']] ~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^ KeyError: 'href'