Facebook Page Access Tokens - Do these expire?

dbau picture dbau · Oct 8, 2011 · Viewed 42.8k times · Source

I'm building an app that allows users to administrate their Facebook Fan Pages. This requires the following two Access Tokens:

  1. A User Access Token
  2. A Page Access Token

I'm quite familiar with User Access Tokens, but not with Page Access Tokens.

Does anybody know how long the Page Access Token remains valid? All I can find on the Facebook website is this succinct paragraph, which doesn't mention anything about it's expiry.

Can I assume that if I am requesting the User Access Token with the offline_access permission the Page Access Token will also last indefinitely (unless the user changes their password or manually deauthorises my app)?

I'm asking because I want to know how often I should query the Facebook Graph API and acquire Page Access Tokens. Should I simply request them once when the user registers? Or should I request them one each API Call in the event they continuously change? The latter is obviously more taxing!

Answer

rmarscher picture rmarscher · Feb 18, 2012

Page Tokens expire when the access token expires for the user that the page token was generated from. Edit 6.28.2013: If you extend the user access token and obtain a new page access token for the user, that page token will not expire unless the user de-authorizes your app.

Offline access has now been deprecated, but you are allowed to extend an access token to last for 60 days. If you extend the user's access token, then the page tokens generated from that user account will also have their expiration extended to match will not expire (edited 6.28.2013). The value for the page tokens may change after being extended, so be sure to grab new page tokens from the user's /accounts graph connection after extending the user token.

You can continue to extend these access tokens once per day. So you should regenerate the access tokens each day that the user interacts with your app.

See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens/#pagetokens https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens/#extending https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/
https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2011/05/13/how-to--handle-expired-access-tokens/