Get Facebook long-lived token and never expired token

Introduction

In this article, I’m going to share how to get Facebook’s long lived token and never expired token via either PHP or Facebook’s Graph API Explorer.

Currently I’m working on a Facebook live-stream selling optimized system, and found that the short lived token for web is only effective for not longer than 2 hours, far shorter than 3 months on Android, and 2 months on iOS.
Although it will be okay if we just set our script properly, I spent some time figuring out how to get long lived token and never expired token

Facebook Graph API Explorer

long lived token

Firstly, let’s get long lived token via Facebook’s Graph API Explorer

• Let’s create some Test Users
  

• Get token from Test Users
  

• On Graph API Explorer
  

• Enter the token we just got

• Press submit

• Press the exclamation mark beside token，and press Open In Access Token Tool
  

• Click Extend Access Token on bottom left corner
  

• got long lived token
  

Never expired token

Now, let’s get never expired token through Graph API Tool

• Firstly, let’s login with Test User account, and create a fan page
• Secondly, let’s repeat all the process mentioned above, and then we will get a never expired token
  

PHP

long lived token

Now let’s get long lived token via calling Facebook’s API with PHP

• Call Facebook’s API with PHP’s function file_get_contents

  public static function getLongLivedToken($token)
  {
      $url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?grant_type=fb_exchange_token&client_id=yourClientID&client_secret=yourClientSecret&fb_exchange_token=shortLivedToken;
      return json_decode(file_get_contents($url), true);
  }

• You will get information below:

  {
      "result": true,
      "response": {
          "access_token": "EAAEpKfFACZA8BAGyTFU29VFIlEjhDaUe66eliyWdGQDfVTBUUdFZBZAGeZBEgTEwxgthvdABuzECYi1ahqm8ZCYNRSV9YMnegq7XxCouP1sR8kXMdnNFysGb2IHZBhSB3KENeTZCBzHrFSJ9BJLt9k6xkuWkJsVHnG0KahmFmybKTG6pVaFoZATN",
          "expires_in": 5182393
      }
  }

Conclusion

As to how to get never expired token via PHP, it seems like we will need to pass the APP review and get more permission, so I’m not able to test it for now.