Facebook Reels Uploader

Facebook Reels Uploader: publish a Reel to your Page or profile from a video URL

Give it a public link to your MP4 and your own Facebook credentials, and it posts the Reel, waits until Facebook actually shows it, and hands back the reel id and its link.

The credentials are the part to settle first, because there is no way around them. Publishing to a Page wants a Page access token and goes through Meta's official API, which is the route to use if you can. Publishing to a personal profile is only possible with your own Facebook cookies, because Meta's API publishes Reels to Pages and nothing else, whatever token you hold. Run it with no credentials at all and you get a labelled sample row: nothing is uploaded, and no publish fee and no megabytes are charged.

🔍 What Facebook Reels Uploader does

Two routes to the same job. Supplying a pageAccessToken picks the first one.

On the API route Meta fetches your videoUrl itself, so nothing large moves through the run. When Meta cannot reach that URL the run downloads the file and pushes the bytes to Meta instead, rather than failing.

The clip is checked before anything is transferred: 3 seconds or longer (3 to 90 on the API route), 540x960 or larger, 24 to 60 fps, and inside Meta's 16:9 to 9:16 shape band. Vertical 1080x1920, H.264 with AAC sound, is what Meta documents. Anything outside that is refused with BAD_INPUT before a byte moves.

A closed composer is not a published reel, and a 200 from Meta is not one either. Both transcoding and review can reject a video minutes after the upload looked fine. So the run lists the reels on the target first, publishes, then watches up to three minutes for a reel id that was not there before. No new id means UPLOAD_UNCONFIRMED and no publish fee, and a list it cannot read at all stops it instead of publishing blind. On the browser route the caption and the Instagram toggle are read back first: a wrong caption, or a post to a platform you did not ask for, is worse than no reel.

📥 What you give it

{
  "videoUrl": "https://example.com/my-reel.mp4",
  "caption": "Behind the scenes from Tuesday #workshop",
  "target": "page",
  "pageId": "1234567890",
  "pageAccessToken": "<your long-lived Page token>"
}

📤 What you get back

One row per run. This is a real row from a real run whose cookies had expired, which is the shape you get when nothing was published. The message is cut short here:

{
  "ok": false,
  "platform": "facebook",
  "lane": "browser",
  "target": "profile",
  "posted": false,
  "confirmed": false,
  "reelId": null,
  "reelUrl": null,
  "publishedAt": null,
  "errorCode": "SESSION_INVALID",
  "error": "SESSION_INVALID: Your Facebook session is not logged in (Facebook redirected to the login page). Cookies are revoked by logging out, by \"Log out of all sessions\", and often by a password change. Re-export c_user, xs and datr from a browser where you are signed in. ...",
  "caption": "billing audit run 2",
  "videoUrl": "https://download.samplelib.com/mp4/sample-5s.mp4",
  "warnings": [],
  "chargeStatus": "pending",
  "chargeSummaryKey": "CHARGE_SUMMARY.json",
  "debugScreenshot": "SESSION_INVALID.png",
  "debugHtml": "SESSION_INVALID.html"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three places to look.

The codes worth knowing:

▶️ How to run it

1. For a Page, mint the token once. Create an app at developers.facebook.com as the account that admins the Page, open the Graph API Explorer, add pages_show_list, pages_read_engagement and pages_manage_posts, generate a token, switch the dropdown from *User Token* to Page Token, then extend it in the Access Token Debugger. GET /me/accounts?fields=id,name,tasks should list your Page with CREATE_CONTENT. 2. For a profile, copy c_user, xs and datr from DevTools on a signed-in facebook.com tab, under Application, then Cookies. Values exactly as shown, %3A included. 3. Open Facebook Reels Uploader, paste your videoUrl and caption, fill in the fields for your route. 4. Click Start, then read reelUrl on the result row.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.15 per reel through the API route, $0.35 through the browser route. Flat on every Apify plan. Either way the fee applies only when Facebook confirms the reel is up: a run that fails or cannot be confirmed pays no publish fee.

The browser route also costs $0.02 for each megabyte of video moved through this actor's own connection, and those megabytes are billed whether the reel landed or not, because the traffic already happened. Point proxyUrls at your own servers and there is no megabyte charge on that run. The API route never charges per megabyte: Meta collects the file itself.

A demo run uploads nothing, so it pays no publish fee and nothing per megabyte.

💡 What people use it for

• Posting the day's clip to a Page from a pipeline, without anybody opening Business Suite.
• Scheduling a week of reels in one sitting on the API route, each with its own publish time.
• Publishing to a personal creator profile, which no API token can do.
• Pushing an approved edit straight from storage, by its link.

🚧 What it does not do

• It does not hold your credentials. You pass them per run, and the cookie fields stay out of

the dataset, the store and the log.

• No personal profile through the API. Meta publishes Reels to Pages only, so a profile means

cookies.

• No scheduling or drafts on the browser route. Anything but publish now is refused up front.
• One video per run. For a batch, run it once per clip.
• Meta allows 30 API reels per Page per 24 hours, which is Meta's published limit, not ours.
• It cannot see a music or rights takedown. A reel can publish cleanly and be muted or blocked

minutes later over its audio, and Meta sends no signal for it. The run reports the publish it confirmed and nothing beyond that.

• Reach is not visible either. Whether anyone is shown the reel is outside anything an uploader

can tell you.

• No editing, trimming or format conversion. The file you point at is the file that gets posted.

🧭 Which uploader do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need Meta's App Review? No. You admin the app and the Page, so the token you mint for yourself is enough. The setup above is a one-off and takes about ten minutes.

Why is the browser route more expensive? It runs a real session and a real composer, and the video passes through the run. The API route just hands Meta a URL.

What if my run says UPLOAD_UNCONFIRMED? Look at the account first. The reel may well be there, in which case retrying would post it twice. No publish fee was charged either way.

Can I publish to a Page without cookies? Yes, and you should. The API route is the reliable one.

Is my session safe? The cookie fields are secret and never leave the run. Logging out everywhere, or changing the password, revokes them.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the run ID and the errorCode from the result row. Never paste a cookie value or a token into an issue.