xfa: Facebook Embed Scraper for Discord

xfa (similar to fixupx.com or fxtwitter.com) is a self-hostable Node.js web server that intercepts requests for Facebook posts, videos, reels, and photos, and returns a Discord-optimized HTML page with rich OpenGraph and oEmbed metadata.

When a user posts a Facebook link in Discord (e.g., https://xfa-facebook.com/share/r/18EhyfvqST/), Discord's crawler requests the page. xfa scrapes the post details, retrieves direct video streams (.mp4 CDN URLs) and high-quality preview images, and formats them so Discord can embed the video and image directly in the chat window.

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Features

• Direct Video Embeds: Scrapes direct Facebook CDN .mp4 URLs to play reels and videos inline on Discord.
• Rich Media Previews: Extracts high-quality post images, descriptions, and authors.
• Smart User-Agent Routing:
  • Discord/Telegram/Slack/etc. Bots: Served with customized HTML containing OpenGraph metadata and oEmbed tags.
  • Normal Users (Browsers): Redirected instantly (via HTTP 302 and Javascript backup) to the original Facebook link.
• oEmbed Integration: Custom endpoint to display the original publisher/author's name and profile link at the top of the Discord embed.
• Robust Scraper Fallbacks:
  1. Direct Browser emulation (Highest quality, yields direct video CDN links).
  2. Direct Bot fallback (Extracts standard meta tags).
  3. Iframe Plugin parsing (Resilient fallback utilizing Facebook's official widgets).

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16 or higher)
• npm or pnpm

Installation

1. Clone or copy this repository to your hosting environment.
2. Install the dependencies:

   npm install

Configuration

You can configure the server port by creating a .env file in the root directory (optional, defaults to port 3000):

PORT=3000

Running the Server

Start the production server:

npm start

Or run in development mode:

npm run dev

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Testing

To run the URL parser and metadata scraper tests:

node test.js

To run the Express server integration tests:

node test-server.js

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How to Use on Discord

1. Host this server on a public domain (e.g., using Fly.io, Railway, Render, or a VPS with Nginx and PM2). Make sure SSL (HTTPS) is enabled, as Discord requires HTTPS for player embeds.
2. When sharing a Facebook link, replace the hostname facebook.com (or www.facebook.com, m.facebook.com, etc.) with your custom domain (e.g., xfa-fb.com or yourdomain.com).
3. Example:
   • Original link: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/18EhyfvqST/
   • Modified link: https://yourdomain.com/share/r/18EhyfvqST/
4. Discord will fetch the link, parse the OpenGraph/oEmbed tags returned by your server, and show a beautiful inline video player. Normal users who click the link in Discord will be seamlessly redirected back to the official Facebook post.