Facebook comments — live scraper (Apify)

This Actor opens each post URL in a real browser (Playwright + Crawlee), scrolls the comment thread, and outputs rows compatible with apify/facebook-comments-scraper, plus from, author, created_time for social-buzzbrand-api (facebookMetaAPI.js).

Modes

Mode	When
Live scrape (default)	mockData: false, pass startUrls with public post permalinks.
Mock	mockData: true — 6 sample rows only (tests).
Passthrough	rawComments: [...] — no browser; normalize and push (ETL).

Input (same as your backend)

{
  "includeNestedComments": false,
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.facebook.com/page/posts/pfbid..." }]
}

Optional: maxComments, maxScrolls, scrollDelayMs, useMobileHost, proxyConfiguration.

Production tips

• Use Apify Residential proxy — Facebook often blocks datacenter IPs.
• Public posts with comments visible without login work best.
• Markup changes → maintain src/scrape.js selectors over time.

Local run

cd apify-facebook-comments-mirror
npm install
npx playwright install chromium
mkdir -p storage/key_value_stores/default
cp INPUT.example.json storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
npx apify-cli run

On Apify Cloud, the Docker image includes Chrome — no playwright install needed.

Docker

Dockerfile uses apify/actor-node-playwright-chrome:20.