FB Event Map API

A simple Elixir webservice returning Facebook events near a geographical point. An app using this webservice is hosted at https://mromnia.github.io/evmap.

How to use

The API is currently hosted at https://fb-event-map.ml/events. To download events for a particular location, simply make a GET request with two parameters:

• lat - floating point number representing latitude
• lng - floating point number representing longitude

If you plan on using the API more than a couple of times a day, PLEASE also provide your own Facebook access token in a custom request header:

• FB-Token-Auth (header)

Facebook's API is rate limited, and every batch of events downloaded is a dozen or so requests. If you don't know how to get a Facebook access token, the simplest way is to create a Facebook app and use a string in the format "app_id|app_secret" as the access token. Yes, the "|" character is supposed to be there.

Technology used

• Backend

  • Elixir
  • Plug (no Phoenix - seemed overkill)
  • Redis (caching requests to Facebook API)
  • Docker / Docker Compose

• Frontend

  • JavaScript (no framework, just slightly messy vanilla JS + jQuery)
  • Google Maps

TODO

• Proper error handling
• Tests
• Possibly some better way to deploy

Motivation

This project was created mostly to learn some Elixir and Docker. The method for downloading Facebook events was heavily inspired by https://github.com/tobilg/facebook-events-by-location-core.