Facebook Birthday List to ICS file

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11 Oct 2019 - 2 minute read
categories: notes tags: digital wellbeing python

I have recently stopped using facebook, but I really miss the convenience of the birthday notifications. I tried to find the .ics which you could export from facebook events page to your calendar program but it was nowhere to be found and I thought I would have to script scraping it myself.

A quick search on github later, I found that someone had already beat me to it.

You can find the repository on github and follow the documentation, but I have documented the steps I followed below:

The first step is to fetch the repository from github and editing the config.

git clone [email protected]:mobeigi/fb2cal.git

cd fb2cal

cp config/config-template.ini config/config.ini
vim config/config.ini

I did not want to upload to google drive which is default so I edited the default config to save the file locally. In case you face errors, you might need to set logging to DEBUG to figure out what went wrong.

[AUTH]
fb_email = [email protected]
fb_pass = xxxxxxxxxxx

[DRIVE]
upload_to_drive = False
drive_file_id = 
ics_file_name = birthdays.ics

[FILESYSTEM]
save_to_file = True
ics_file_path = ./birthdays.ics

[LOGGING]
level = INFO

Now we need to download the dependencies, I prefer to use pipenv to automate the virtual environment creation but you can install them using pip as well.

pipenv shell
pipenv install

Now we need to run the script and wait for it to complete.

cd src
python fb2cal.py

After it is complete you can view the .ics file and import it into your calendar app.

cat birthdays.ics

Afterwards, don’t forget to delete the config.ini file containing your facebook password in plaintext.

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