Running Facebook application on localhost

Question

I am planning to connect to Facebook chat from my localhost. I will need to get the session key from Facebook. When I give the site URL as localhost:8080 or ip-address:8080 it does not work.

I read about setting up two apps with 2 different API keys one runs on dev m/c and other on localhost but I did not quite get it.

Can anyone explain how to run a Facebook app on localhost?

Answer 1

I wrote a tutorial about this a while ago.

The most important point is the "Site URL":

Site URL: http://localhost/app_name/

Where the folder structure is something like:

app_name
¦   index.php
¦
+---canvas
¦   ¦   index.php
¦   ¦
¦   +---css
¦           main.css
¦           reset.css
¦
+---src
        facebook.php
        fb_ca_chain_bundle.crt

EDIT:
Kavya: how does the FB server recognize my localhost even without an IP or port??

I don't think this has anything to do with Facebook, I guess since the iframe src parameter is loaded from client-side it'll treat your local URL as if you put it directly on your browser.

For example have a file on your online server with content (e.g. online.php):

<iframe src="http://localhost/test.php" width="100%" height="100%">
    <p>Not supported!</p>
</iframe>

And on your localhost root directory, have the file test.php:

<?php echo "Hello from Localhost!"; ?>

Now visit http://your_domain.com/online.php you will see your localhost file's content!

This is why realtime subscriptions and deauthorize callbacks (just to mention) won't work with localhost URLs! because Facebook will ping (send http requests) to these URLs but obviously Facebook server won't translate those URLs to yours!