v0.1.2

fb reads public Facebook groups in full.

Highlights

• fb group now returns a group's name, description, cover image, privacy, and URL, read from the same server-rendered page everything else uses.
• A group feed lists its posts, and each post carries its id, author, date, reaction and comment counts, media, permalink, and text.
• Comments on a group post come back through the normal post read, so a public group can be walked end to end.

fb group python -o json
fb group python --posts -n 20 -o jsonl
fb post <group-post-url> --comments -o jsonl

Member count is not part of the crawler surface, so it is only filled in when the group description spells it out. Private groups exit 4.

Install

brew install tamnd/tap/fb
scoop install fb
docker pull ghcr.io/tamnd/fb:0.1.2

Linux packages (deb/rpm/apk), prebuilt binaries for linux/macOS/windows/freebsd, CycloneDX SBOMs, and cosign signatures are attached below. Verify with the checksums.txt, .sig, and .pem assets.

v0.1.1

This release changes how fb reaches Facebook and adds a command for mirroring a Page to disk.

Reading without a cookie

fb now reads Facebook as an anonymous web crawler. It presents a crawler user agent and reads the same server-rendered pages Facebook serves to search engines, so a public Page, profile, group, or post comes back as HTML with the text, counts, media, and a few preview comments baked in. There is no login, no cookie, and no browser to drive.

• The cookie layer is gone: the --cookie and --cookie-file flags, the FACEBOOK_COOKIE environment variables, and the cookie request header.
• fb whoami now reports the access mode and user agent instead of a session.
• The trade-off is depth: a feed exposes the most recent posts rather than the full history, and a post carries a handful of preview comments rather than its whole thread. Private targets still exit 4.

Archiving

• fb archive <page> mirrors a Page's recent feed to a browsable tree of Markdown: one file per post under <out>/<page>/YYYY/MM/, plus a generated README.md indexed by year and month with a stats table.
• Re-running is incremental. A small index.json records what is on disk, so a second run fetches only new posts; --force overwrites. The index and each post are written as the crawl proceeds, so an interrupted run resumes cleanly.
• Post slugs are transliterated to ASCII, Vietnamese diacritics included, so accented titles produce clean file names.

Fixes

• Group post permalinks (groups/<id>/posts/<id>) are now recognized when walking a feed.

Install

Homebrew

brew install tamnd/tap/fb

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add tamnd https://github.com/tamnd/scoop-bucket
scoop install fb

Container

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/fb:0.1.1 version

Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / RHEL, Alpine
Download the .deb, .rpm, or .apk for your architecture from the assets below and install it with your package manager.

Binary
Download the archive for your platform from the assets below, extract, and put fb on your PATH.

Notes

• Every archive ships a CycloneDX SBOM, and checksums.txt is signed with keyless cosign (checksums.txt.sig + checksums.txt.pem).

Documentation: https://facebook-cli.tamnd.com

v0.1.0

The first release of fb, a delightful, scriptable command line for Facebook. It turns facebook.com into typed, structured data from a single pure-Go binary with no runtime dependencies and no browser.

Highlights

• Entities. Resolve any Page, profile, or group to a rich record, and stream its feed with --posts, bounded by --limit or by date.
• Posts in depth. Pull a post with its full comment thread (--comments, --replies, with parent_id on every reply) and its reaction breakdown (--reactions, --list). Pagination walks to the end, so -n 0 takes everything.
• Media. Stream photos, videos, and reels; resolve a single photo or video including playable sources with --streams; list public events.
• Discovery. search across Facebook's surfaces by type, and fb id to classify any handle, id, or URL with no network call.
• Datasets. seed a root into URLs, crawl them into records, and db query a local SQLite store with SQL.
• Output. One formatter for every command: table, jsonl, json, csv, tsv, yaml, url, and raw, with --fields and --template.

Install

Homebrew

brew install tamnd/tap/fb

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add tamnd https://github.com/tamnd/scoop-bucket
scoop install fb

Container

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/fb:0.1.0 version

Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / RHEL, Alpine
Download the .deb, .rpm, or .apk for your architecture from the assets below and install it with your package manager.

Binary
Download the archive for your platform from the assets below, extract, and put fb on your PATH.

Notes

• Facebook gates most reads behind a login. fb reads the no-JavaScript surface and is explicit about the wall: commands that need a session exit 4 with a hint. Supply a cookie with --cookie, --cookie-file, or FACEBOOK_COOKIE to unlock full data.
• Every archive ships a CycloneDX SBOM, and checksums.txt is signed with keyless cosign (checksums.txt.sig + checksums.txt.pem).

Documentation: https://facebook-cli.tamnd.com