Instagram webhook not activating

Question

My goal is to use the Facebook webhooks to get a notification whenever an IG user mentions my IG account. For that I have followed these steps:

• I have created a Facebook page and connected it with an Instagram business account.
• I have created a Facebook app (which is now live) and added the product "webhooks".
• I have connected my app with my page.
• I have created a webhook and subscribed to the mentions event.
• I have tested the webhook, using the tools provided by Facebook and it works.

The problem I'm facing is that I can't get my app to work with real data. I have tried to mention my business IG account from my IG personal account, but nothing happens. My callback url is not getting called.

My app doesn't need users to login, so I'm not sure if I need to send my app for review. Do I need a special permission?

Answer 1

I also had this problem and I managed to solve it. Until we have advanced privileges, we need to test with a tester and administrator user to receive the private push from the webhook. This is not clearly stated in the official documentation, which led us to a lot of detours!

Answer 2

I just figure it out of this problem. There is a mistake in the official Instagram webhook guide:

With Graph API version 3.2, the /{page-id}/subscribed_apps edge now requires the subscribed_fields parameter, which currently does not support Instagram webhooks fields. To get around this, use your app's dashboard to subscribe.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/guides/webhooks/#install-app

However, the app's dashboard subscribe is another function. You need your page to subscribe to some field to receive webhooks

Just POST /{your-instagram-connected-page-id}/subscribed_apps?subscribed_fields=feed&access_token={your-instagram-connected-page-token}

Then you will receive webhooks in live mode.

Answer 3

Did you verified your Facebook app via app review? If not, you won't get production data via a webhook callback for the Instagram. I had the same issue and asked the Facebook support and got following response:

However, this is not the same for instagram or pages. This is just how the product teams have decided to implement it. For app review, you can show a mock process of the flow, using either the test webhook or your own process. The app review is less about technical implementation steps, but just a way to make sure that your app is going to use the permission in a way that follows our guidelines, so mocking the procedure should be fine. The reviewers understand that you do not receive webhooks in dev mode and should take this into consideration.

For more information check out following links:

Why is the Instagram Graph API webhook not working

https://developers.facebook.com/support/bugs/495933900986533/

Answer 4

I had the same problem. For my case, when I installed the app via graph api explorer, the page token I was using didn't have the instagram_manage_insights permission. So I granted that permission, got a new token, re did the POST request to the {page-id}/subscribed_apps again with the new token and that fixed the problem. Just for the record, I used a system user token from the business manager.