Login to Facebook using python requests

First of all, you need ALL the form data. You can’t just send user+pass, the server won’t allow it.
Secondly you will need to take care and use the cookies recieved from Facebook in order for this to work.

But all in all, yes you can use request or any other library.
But i would reccomend using their API instead.

I can say it’s quite annoying to log in to Facebook without using their API. They also like to change everything so often it is quite the job to maintain the code.

I did this a while ago, but I don’t think my code is up to speed with current Facebook. However it should be a useful starting-point:

https://gitorious.org/blogsmashonfb/blogsmashonfb/source/4f7ee94a56fdffe9392485df8999e340f97f4bbe:

It has two parts, a webcrawler and a Facebook-handler (the latter is what you are interested in).

One major issue you have in your code is that you must first visit Facebook, because they send you a login form with hidden elements that you need to send back.

I was also searching for answer. Doing it with requests is pain. So, i used mechanize.

import mechanize
browser = mechanize.Browser()
browser.set_handle_robots(False)
cookies = mechanize.CookieJar()
browser.set_cookiejar(cookies)
browser.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.41 Safari/534.7')]
browser.set_handle_refresh(False)

url = 'http://www.facebook.com/login.php'
browser.open(url)
browser.select_form(nr = 0)       #This is login-password form -> nr = number = 0
browser.form['email'] = YourLogin
browser.form['pass'] = YourPassw
response = browser.submit()
print response.read()

It works. mechanize.browser is emulated browser, so you don’t need to send all form values. It will send them as normal browser, you should provide only login and password.

Good luck!

A library like RoboBrowser makes things like logging into Facebook very easy:

import robobrowser

class Facebook(robobrowser.RoboBrowser):

    url = 'https://facebook.com'

    def __init__(self, email, password):
        self.email = email
        self.password = password
        super().__init__()
        self.login()

    def login(self):
        self.open(self.url)    
        login_form = self.get_form(id='login_form')
        login_form['email'] = self.email
        login_form['pass'] = self.password
        self.submit_form(login_form)

As said by others using requests is a pain. You can do it by using selenium. Install selenium by going to their website or simply isntall it using pip.

pip install -U selenium

I have written the code below. I tried it myself and it works.

from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary

binary = FirefoxBinary(r'C:Program Files (x86)Mozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe')
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)
driver.get('https://www.facebook.com/')


username= "your_username"
password = "your_password"

UN = driver.find_element_by_id('email')

UN.send_keys(username)

PS = driver.find_element_by_id('pass')

PS.send_keys(password)

LI = driver.find_element_by_id('loginbutton')

LI.click()

This works (April 2017)

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import argparse
import datetime
import json
import logging
import re
import random
import requests
import shutil
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq


def main(username, password):

    logging.basicConfig(filename='imgur2fb.log', level=logging.DEBUG)

    session = requests.session()

    uid, dtsg = login(session, username, password)


def login(session, username, password):

    '''
    Login to Facebook
    '''

    # Navigate to the Facebook homepage
    response = session.get('https://facebook.com')

    # Construct the DOM
    dom = pq(response.text)

    # Get the lsd value from the HTML. This is required to make the login request
    lsd = dom('[name="lsd"]').val()

    # Perform the login request
    response = session.post('https://www.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1', data={
        'lsd': lsd,
        'email': username,
        'pass': password,
        'default_persistent': '0',
        'timezone': '-60',
        'lgndim': '',
        'lgnrnd': '',
        'lgnjs': '',
        'locale':'en_GB',
        'qsstamp': ''
    })

    '''
    Get the users ID and fb_dtsg token. The fb_dtsg token is required when making requests as a logged in user. It
    never changes, so we only need to grab this token once.

    If the login was successful a cookie 'c_user' is set by Facebook. If the login failed, the 'c_user' cookie
    will not be present. This will raise an exception.
    '''
    try:
        uid = session.cookies['c_user']
        dtsg = re.search(r'(type="hidden" name="fb_dtsg" value="([0-9a-zA-Z-_:]+)")', response.text).group(1)

        dtsg = dtsg[dtsg.find("value")+6:]
        dtsg = dtsg[1:-1]

    except KeyError:
        raise Exception('Login Failed!')

    return uid, dtsg



try:
    main(username='*****', password='*****')
except Exception, e:
    logging.exception(e)
    print e

Here’s my working Code (May 2017 Python 3.6). To make it work for you, just hard code your own USERNAME, PASSWORD and PROTECTED_URL

# https://gist.github.com/UndergroundLabs/fad38205068ffb904685
# this github example said tokens are also necessary, but I found 
# they were not needed
import requests

USERNAME = '[email protected]'
PASSWORD = '----password'
PROTECTED_URL = 'https://m.facebook.com/groups/318395378171876?view=members'
# my original intentions were to scrape data from the group page
# PROTECTED_URL = 'https://www.facebook.com/groups/318395378171876/members/'
# but the only working login code I found needs to use m.facebook URLs
# which can be found by logging into https://m.facebook.com/login/ and 
# going to the the protected page the same way you would on a desktop

def login(session, email, password):
    '''
    Attempt to login to Facebook. Returns cookies given to a user
    after they successfully log in.
    '''

    # Attempt to login to Facebook
    response = session.post('https://m.facebook.com/login.php', data={
        'email': email,
        'pass': password
    }, allow_redirects=False)

    assert response.status_code == 302
    assert 'c_user' in response.cookies
    return response.cookies

if __name__ == "__main__":

    session = requests.session()
    cookies = login(session, USERNAME, PASSWORD)
    response = session.get(PROTECTED_URL, cookies=cookies, 
allow_redirects=False)
    assert response.text.find('Home') != -1

    # to visually see if you got into the protected page, I recomend copying
    # the value of response.text, pasting it in the HTML input field of
    # http://codebeautify.org/htmlviewer/ and hitting the run button

First you need to know the data to be posted. Follow this link.

After you get all the required data the code is simple as follows:

import requests, bs4`    
s = requests.Session()
url = 'https://www.facebook.com/login'

res = s.get(url)
form_data = {
        # Copy paste the form data here as a valid python dict
}
s.post(url, data=form_data)

# Now try accessing your profile from sessions object

This worked for me.