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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fancy FAQs with jQuery Sliders

    Frequently asked questions can be super boring, right? They don't have to be! I've already shown you how to create fancy FAQs with MooTools -- here's how to create the same effect using jQuery. The HTML Simply a series of H3s and DIVs wrapper...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

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!