Download all facebook messages from a group chat to a mongoDB database and save all images locally.
⚠️ August 2021 Update: Facebook has changed its API since this script was made. You can now download your messages by following the instructions here.
Before running, set up a mongo database. mLab offers free hosted databases for up to 500 MB. Set your MONGO_URL environment variable equal to the connection string.
Facebook's Graph API does not have a way to retreive messages using an facebook developer access token. Instead, you need to log in to facebook in your browser, open up the group chat you wish to scrape, and inspect a sample network request using chrome's developer tools. Then, set the following environment variables based on the information you find in the Request Headers and Form Data sections:
REFERERCOOKIEDYNPCSPIN_BSPIN_RSPIN_TUSERFB_DTSGJAZEOESTDOC_IDQUERY_IDSTARTING_TIMESTAMP
npm i
node index.js
Pictures will be saved to the ./pictures directory. The name of the file will be the timestamp in milliseconds that the picture was first sent, eg. 1514782800000.jpg for a picture sent Jan 1, 2018.