fb-group-scraper

This repo is not a scraping library, it is just a wrapper script to make the facebook-scraper work for scraping fb group posts (NOT group members).

How to Setup and Run

1. Install library using pip install -r requirements.txt
2. Install extension "Get cookies.txt LOCALLY" in Chrome or Firefox.
3. Open https://mbasic.facebook.com/, use the extension to download the cookies to local.
4. Open your download folder, copy the file to this repo and change the "cookie" parameter in "scraper_csv.py" to the newly downloaded cookie file name.
5. Change the group id to your desired group id
6. If you want to start from fresh, delete "next_page.txt" and all "messages_*.csv" in folder "data". This ensures the data start from scratch. Else, if you want to continue from the previous scraping progress, don't delete the files, and adjust the page_start variable in the code.
7. Change the number of page in python scraper_csv.py if required.
8. Run python scraper_csv.py
9. After finished, you can merge the csv by running bash data/merge.bash, or trim the columns by running python csv_process.py