Facebook Post Automation

A small Python automation that generates a Hungarian name-day greeting image and posts it to a Facebook Page once a day, automatically.

In Hungary every day of the year is tied to one or more first names ("névnap" = name day), and congratulating people on their name day is a small tradition. The bot looks up today's name, draws a greeting card and publishes it.

Why I built it (and what I learned)

This was an experiment to see whether I could build a complete, hands-off automation end to end. Hungarian name days were a perfect fit — there is a name to celebrate every single day — so it became a steady daily content source.

How it runs:

• The code is deployed to GitHub Actions and runs once a day, on its own.
• Each run first generates the image for that day's name day (currently Hungarian, but the same approach works for Slovak, Czech or any other dataset), then posts the generated image to Facebook.
• No server to maintain — GitHub runs it on a schedule and the secrets live in repository secrets.

The main lesson: Facebook doesn't like automation. Bot-style posting gets deprioritized, so the algorithm won't recommend the page to many people and organic reach stays very low. So this isn't a growth hack — it's a finished learning project, and I'm sharing it as a clean example of scheduled automation, image generation and the Graph API.

Use cases

• 🎉 Name-day / birthday greetings posted automatically to a page.
• 🌍 Other languages or countries — swap data/nevnapok.json for a Slovak, Czech or any other dataset; the pipeline stays the same.
• 🗓️ Any "one post per day" content (quotes, tips, "on this day" facts) by changing what the image draws and what main.py looks up.
• 🧩 A template for scheduled Graph API posting in your own projects.

How it works

date.today()  ->  look up name in nevnapok.json  ->  draw greeting image  ->  post to Facebook

File	Responsibility
main.py	Daily entry point: today's name → image → Facebook post
generate_all.py	Utility: render every name day to output/ (no posting)
src/config.py	Loads all settings/secrets from the environment (.env)
src/namedays.py	Loads the JSON data and looks up names for a date
src/image.py	Generates the greeting image (random background + centered text)
src/facebook.py	Uploads a photo to a Facebook Page via the Graph API

Setup

1. Clone and enter the project

   git clone https://github.com/martonalpha/facebook-post-automation.git
   cd facebook-post-automation

2. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies

   python -m venv .venv
   # Windows:
   .venv\Scripts\activate
   # macOS / Linux:
   source .venv/bin/activate
   
   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Configure your secrets

   Copy the example file and fill in your own values:

   cp .env.example .env

   FB_PAGE_ID=put_your_facebook_page_id_here
   FB_ACCESS_TOKEN=put_your_facebook_page_access_token_here

   The .env file is git-ignored, so your token never ends up on GitHub.

Getting a Facebook Page access token

1. Create a Facebook App at https://developers.facebook.com/.
2. Use the Graph API Explorer to generate a Page access token with the pages_manage_posts and pages_read_engagement permissions: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/.
3. Exchange it for a long-lived token so it doesn't expire after a few hours.
4. Put the token and your numeric Page ID into .env.

⚠️ Never commit a real token. If a token ever leaks, revoke it in the Facebook developer dashboard and generate a new one.

Usage

Preview the images locally (no posting needed):

python generate_all.py

Generate and post today's greeting:

python main.py

Running it daily

GitHub Actions (how I deployed it)

The repo includes .github/workflows/daily-post.yml, which runs main.py once a day in the cloud — no server needed.

1. In your repository go to Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions and add FB_PAGE_ID and FB_ACCESS_TOKEN as repository secrets.
2. Adjust the cron time in the workflow if you like (it is in UTC).

You can also trigger a run manually from the Actions tab to test it.

Locally with cron / Task Scheduler

Linux / macOS (cron) — post every day at 08:00:

0 8 * * * cd /path/to/facebook-post-automation && /path/to/.venv/bin/python main.py >> bot.log 2>&1

Windows (Task Scheduler): create a Basic Task that runs daily, points to .venv\Scripts\python.exe with main.py as the argument, and set "Start in" to the project folder.

Credits

• Name-day data (data/nevnapok.json) comes from the froccsos/nevnapok-json project (MIT License). Original source of the list: https://mek.oszk.hu/00000/00056/html/196.htm.
• Font: Great Vibes, licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see assets/fonts/OFL.txt).

License

This project's source code is released under the MIT License. The bundled data and font keep their own respective licenses noted above.