Get Open Graph Data with Node.js

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!