Configuration

fb works with sensible defaults out of the box. This page covers where it keeps state and the global flags that change its behavior.

Paths

fb follows the XDG base directory conventions:

• Cache: $XDG_CACHE_HOME/fb, or ~/.cache/fb. Cached HTTP responses keyed by URL.
• Data: $XDG_DATA_HOME/fb, or ~/.local/share/fb. Persistent state.

See the resolved paths and settings any time:

fb config show
fb config path

Access

fb reads Facebook anonymously, as a web crawler, with no login and no cookie. fb whoami reports the mode and the user agent in use. See how fb reads Facebook for what that surface exposes and what stays private.

Request behavior

Flag	Default	Meaning
--rate	2s	Minimum delay between requests
--retries	4	Retry attempts on 429 / 5xx
--timeout	30s	Per-request timeout
-j, --workers	2	Concurrency for fan-out commands
--surface	auto	mbasic, mobile, or auto
--lang	en-US	Accept-Language / locale
--proxy	none	HTTP/SOCKS proxy URL
--user-agent	rotating	Override the default UA set

The defaults are deliberately polite. Facebook is stricter than most targets, so the two-second rate and modest worker count keep the crawler out of trouble.

Caching

Responses are cached on disk by URL and reused within the freshness window:

Flag	Default	Meaning
--cache-ttl	1h	How long a cached response stays fresh
--no-cache	off	Bypass the cache for this run

Clear it with fb cache clear, or see where it lives with fb cache dir.

Output and limits

Flag	Default	Meaning
-o, --output	auto	Output format
--fields	all	Columns to keep and order
--no-header	off	Omit the header row
--template	none	Go template per record
-n, --limit	0	Maximum records (0 = unlimited)
--since / --until	none	Bound a feed by date (YYYY-MM-DD)

Behavior

Flag	Meaning
--raw	Print the upstream HTML/JSON untouched
--dry-run	Print the requests that would be made, do nothing
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress on stderr
-v, --verbose	Increase verbosity (repeatable: -v, -vv)
--color	auto, always, or never
-y, --yes	Assume yes to prompts