Get Open Graph Data with Node.js

By  on  

Two of this blog's most popular posts are Facebook Open Graph META Tags and How to Create a Twitter Card.  I'm not at all surprised because we as content creators want some visual control over how our site is represented and shared on third party sites, especially social media sites.   I was recently posting a link on Tech.pro and they instantly grab open graph information about the page, prepopulating known information, just like Facebook and Twitter, and that got me thinking about the other side of open graph data -- scraping data from a site.  Look no further than the open-graph-scraper JavaScript module!

After installing the module from NPM or GitHub, getting Open Graph information from a given URL is easy:

var ogs = require('open-graph-scraper');

ogs(
	{ url: 'https://davidwalsh.name' }, // Settings object first
	function(er, res) { console.log(er, res); }  // Callback 
);

/*  Result:
	
	{ data:
	   { success: 'true',
	     ogImage: 'https://davidwalsh.name/wp-content/themes/punky/images/logo.png',
	     ogTitle: 'David Walsh - JavaScript, HTML5 Consultant',
	     ogUrl: 'https://davidwalsh.name/',
	     ogSiteName: 'David Walsh Blog',
	     ogDescription: 'David Walsh Blog features tutorials about MooTools, jQuery, Dojo, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, HTML5, MySQL, and more!' },
	  success: true }
	
*/

Simple API and simple result -- lovely.  Of course every programming language will have an equivalent library but we all know JavaScript is king!  Happy sharing everyone!

Recent Features

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS content and attr

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful but in the sense that it allows us to do the little things easily.  There have been larger features added like transitions, animations, and transforms, but one feature that goes under the radar is generated content.  You saw a...

  • By
    Create a Spinning, Zooming Effect with CSS3

    In case you weren't aware, CSS animations are awesome.  They're smooth, less taxing than JavaScript, and are the future of node animation within browsers.  Dojo's mobile solution, dojox.mobile, uses CSS animations instead of JavaScript to lighten the application's JavaScript footprint.  One of my favorite effects...

Discussion

  1. Muneeb

    Hi, David Thank you for this post. When using this code to fetch from multiple links . It is giving unhandled promise rejection.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!