Messenger-CLI (MCLI) provides a way to access Facebook Messenger from the command line. You can send and receive messages with notifications in both group chats and direct messages.
It was written using Node.js and Facebook Chat API.
Clone this repo and run npm install. When the installation is complete, run npm start in the directory – you will be guided through logging into Messenger from there. If you enter the wrong email or password, you can delete credentials.js to start the sign-in process again.
Once you have a successful login, it will be cached in a file called appstate.json, which is the default sign-in method. If this login expires, you may get cryptic errors when you try to start MCLI. If this happens, simply delete appstate.json and you will be logged in again using the credentials stored in credentials.js the next time you run the utility.
This is not an official tool, and does not Facebook's official API for Messenger, as the functionality it replicates (emulating a user account) would not be possible with it. While steps are taken to reduce the possibility of this, your account may be temporarily or permanently locked for suspicious activity by Facebook, so use at your own risk.
When your account receives new messages, they will appear onscreen (sent to stdout from wherever you are running the CLI). You can write new messages directly to stdin.
For the first message you send, you will have to explicitly specify the recipient like this:
> Recipient: message to send
MCLI will search your 20 most recent threads (configurable) for a chat name (for group chats) or a person's name (for one-on-one chats) that matches Recipient. After the first message is sent, you can simply continue to type new messages and they will be sent to the last recipient specified.
To send a message to someone else, simply specify a new recipient using the same syntax shown above.
Alternatively, you can use load: {recipient} to load the latest 10 messages from the matching chat.
Below are a list of commands that, when included in messages, will not appear in the final text sent to the recipient, but will influence the behavior of the chat in some way.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
{read} |
This command will send a read receipt to the recipient thread, marking that you've read its latest message. |
{emoji} |
Wherever this command appears in the text, it will be replaced by the emoji for the recipient thread (👍 by default). |
{bigemoji} |
This command will send a large version of the group emoji to the chat. |
{file|/path/to/file} |
This command will send the file located at the absolute path /path/to/file. |