Uploading a Video to Facebook from AWS S3 using python

· 554 words · 3 minute read
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facebook · video · python · api · s3 · aws · requests

If you have some video files stored in Amazon S3 and you want to upload those videos to a Facebook page, using their video API here is some python code that I used recently.

I spent a good chunk of a day trying to get this too work, so I’m posting this here to help anyone else who is trying to do the same.

This code isn’t using any special facebook libraries it is just using normal python along with the requests library. It should be a good enough example to figure out how to do most things.

It is important to note that you will need a valid access token with correct permissions in order to get this to work, and that isn’t covered in this blog post.

Another thing that is important to note, that this uses a different API host then the rest of the facebook API. Instead of graph.facebook.com it uses graph-video.facebook.com

Requirements:

$ pip install requests requests-toolbelt

Code:

import os
import base64
import requests
from requests_toolbelt import MultipartEncoder
import uuid
import logging


log = logging.getLogger(__name__)


def download_file_to_tmp(source_url):
    """
    download `source_url` to /tmp return the full path, doing it in chunks so
    that we don't have to store everything in memory.
    """
    log.debug("download {0}".format(source_url))
    tmp_location = "/tmp/s3_downloads"

    # come up with a random name to avoid clashes.
    rand_name = str(uuid.uuid4().get_hex().lower()[0:6])

    local_filename = source_url.split('/')[-1]

    # get the extension if it has one
    if local_filename.count(".") > 0:
        ext = local_filename.split('.')[-1]
        tmp_filename = u"{0}.{1}".format(rand_name, ext)
    else:
        tmp_filename = u"{0}.mp4".format(local_filename)

    temp_media_location = os.path.join(tmp_location, tmp_filename)
    # make the temp directory
    if not os.path.exists(tmp_location):
        os.makedirs(tmp_location)

    r = requests.get(source_url, stream=True)
    log.debug("headers = {0}".format(r.headers))
    with open(temp_media_location, 'wb') as f:
        for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
            if chunk:  # filter out keep-alive new chunks
                f.write(chunk)
                f.flush()
                os.fsync(f.fileno())
    log.debug("finished download to {0}".format(temp_media_location))
    return temp_media_location


def remove_file(temp_file):
    """ Given a valid file path remove it """
    if os.path.exists(temp_file):
        os.remove(temp_file)


def upload_file(video_url, page_id, poster_url, access_token,
                description, title):
    """
    ``video_url``: this is where the video is in s3.
    ``page_id``:  me or a page_id for the page you want to post too.
    ``poster_url``:  the url to the poster (thumbnail) for this video
    ``access_token``: your facebook access token with permissions to upload
        to the page you want to post too.
    ``description``:  the description of the video you are posting.
    ``title``:  the title of the video you are posting
    """

    # download to data
    local_video_file = download_file_to_tmp(video_url)
    video_file_name = local_video_file.split("/")[-1]

    if video_file_name and video_file_name.count(".") == 0:
        log.debug("video_file_name has no ext {0}".format(video_file_name))
        # if it doesn't have an extension add one to it.
        video_file_name = "{0}.mp4".format(video_file_name)
        log.debug("video_file_name converted to {0}".format(video_file_name))

    # download to data
    local_poster_file = download_file_to_tmp(poster_url)

    # need to encode it.
    with open(local_poster_file, "rb") as image_file:
        poster_encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())

    # need binary rep of this, not sure if this would do it

    # put it all together to post to facebook
    if page_id or page_id == 'me':
        path = 'me/videos'
    else:
        path = "{0}/videos".format(page_id)

    fb_url = "https://graph-video.facebook.com/{0}?access_token={1}".format(
             path, access_token)

    log.debug("video_file = {0}".format(local_video_file))
    log.debug("thumb_file = {0}".format(local_poster_file))
    log.debug("start upload to facebook")

    # multipart chunked uploads
    m = MultipartEncoder(
        fields={'description': description,
                'title': title,
                'thumb': poster_encoded_string,
                'source': (video_file_name, open(local_video_file, 'rb'))}
    )

    r = requests.post(fb_url, headers={'Content-Type': m.content_type}, data=m)

    if r.status_code == 200:
        j_res = r.json()
        facebook_video_id = j_res.get('id')
        log.debug("facebook_video_id = {0}".format(facebook_video_id))
    else:
        log.error("Facebook upload error: {0}".format(r.text))

    # delete the tmp files
    remove_file(local_video_file)
    remove_file(local_poster_file)

    return facebook_video_id
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