Question

I would like to know if it is possible to have an access token that never expires for post to my page

Now I get the access token with:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/accounts

I have publish_stream and manage_pages permission, but using the Access Token Debugger I see that the token expires in about 1 hour. Is there a way to never expires?

Answer 1

See facebook developers:

By using a long-lived user access token, querying the [User
ID]/accounts endpoint will now provide page access tokens that do not
expire for pages that a user manages.

So, you have to exchange your initial shortlived token for a longlived token with a server side call:

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 

And then query me/accounts with that longlived token. Definitly works for us, i.e. the debugger shows: ‘Expires: Never’

---

edit – our process

So, what we do is:

• first client side authentication with our app where we get a “code” back after the user accepts the requested permissions and connects his account with our app

  https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?
  client_id=YOUR_APP_ID &redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URI &scope=COMMA_SEPARATED_LIST_OF_PERMISSION_NAMES &response_type=code

• Now in our server application we use server side authentication to exchange code for access token:

  https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
  client_id=YOUR_APP_ID &redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URI &client_secret=YOUR_APP_SECRET &code=CODE_GENERATED_BY_FACEBOOK

• With this access_token we do the server side exchange as described above

• Now we request me/accounts and the resulting access_token is always valid

Hope that helps