Spotify Telegram Sync

A userbot that syncs your Spotify playlist with your Telegram channel and updates your bio and a pinned message on your channel based on your current playback.

Table of Contents

• Setup
• How it Works
• Starting the bot
• Deploying to Heroku

Setup

The term bot and userbot will be used interchangeably in this README to refer to the script. To sync your Spotify playlist with your Telegram channel you will need:

• Spotify: client ID, client secret, refresh token
• Telegram: channel username, API ID, API hash and a string session
• Deezer: ARL token
• Database: a table named playlist with two columns: spotify_id, telegram_id
• Environment Variables: Some env vars that you will need to set after setting things up.

Spotify

Go to the developer's dashboard and create an app by clicking on CREATE AN APP. After creating the app, you'll be redirected to another page. In this page (the app's page), you will see Client ID on the left hand side and SHOW CLIENT SECRET. Copy the value of those two and save them somewhere. Now all you need from Spotify is your refresh token.

Before continuing, install the packages in the requirements.txt file. To do this run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now run spotify_refresh_token.py in the setup folder get your refresh token. The script will ask for your Spotify app ID, app secret. After your browser opens up and you click Agree, you will be redirected to your redirected (the link will be something like https://example.com/callback?code=...). Copy the full URL and paste it in the console. Then the script will print out your refresh token. You can run the script from the command line:

python spotify_refresh_token.py

Telegram

Go to my.telegram.org. After logging in, go to API development tools, and create an app. After creating the app, copy App api_id and App api_hash. Next up is getting a Telegram account session in string format.

Now run string_session.py in the setup folder to get the string session. You can run the script from the command line:

python string_session.py

Deezer

To get your ARL token, watch this YouTube video.

Database

You'll need a database with a table named playlist that has spotify_id and telegram_id columns. The userbot uses SQLAlchemy to connect to the database and will automatically create the table for you. All you need to do is provide it with the correct database URL through the DATABASE_URL environment variable. Also make sure to have the database driver installed. For example if you'll be using Postgres, you should have asyncpg installed. Then your database URL would look something like this: postgresql+asyncpg://username:password@host/database_name

Environment Variables

• DATABASE_URL (automatically set in Heroku)
  The URL of your database used by SQLAlchemy

• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID Your Spotify app's client ID

• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET Your Spotify app's client secret

• SPOTIFY_REFRESHT_TOKEN Your Spotify refresh token

• SPOTIFY_PLAYLIST_ID
  The ID of your playlist on Spotify

• TELETHON_API_ID
  The API ID of your Telegram app

• TELETHON_API_HASH
  The API Hash of your Telegram app

• TELETHON_SESSION_STRING
  The string session you generated using string_session.py

• TELEGRAM_CHANNEL
  The username of your Telegram channel. It can also be the channel ID or an invite link.

• DEEZER_ARL_TOKEN Your Deezer ARL token

• UPDATE_BIOS Accepts false or true. Defaults to false.
  Would you like to have your account bio and a pinned message on your channel to be updated to your current playback on Spotify?

• UPDATE_PLAYLIST Accepts false or true. Defaults to false.
  Should changes to the Spotify playlist be reflected on your Telegram channel?

• CHECK_TELEGRAM Accepts false or true. Defaults to false.
  Should changes to the Telegram channel be reflected on your Spotify playlist? For example if a song is posted on your Telegram channel or removed from it.

Now you have all the requirements needed for the userbot. Let's see how the it works. You can skip this part and go straight to starting the bot.

How it Works

Let's take it part by part:

Syncing Telegram Channel and Spotify playlist

To do this, the bot checks your Spotify playlist every hour. Once it gets the tracks from your playlist, the bot compares them to the tracks in the playlist table (initially no tracks). Then it uploads any track that doesn't exist in the database. Finally it saves the Spotify ID and Telegram link of those tracks in the database. Alternatively, if there are tracks which exist in the database, but not in your Spotify playlist, the bot removes those tracks from Telegram using the Telegram link it had saved before.

Telegram Deleted Messages

The bot checks the admin logs and if it finds any deleted tracks, it will search for those songs in the database (using their Telegram link) and then removes them from your Spotify playlist, and from the database as well.

Requires $CHECK_TELEGRAM=true

Telegram New Messages

Whenever you upload or forward a new song to your Telegram channel, the bot uses the song's meta data or its filename to find it on Spotify. If the search is successful, then the bot adds that song to your playlist on Spotify and the database if it isn't there already.

Requires $CHECK_TELEGRAM=true

Updating the Bio

The bot can also update your account bio and a pinned message in your Telegram channel to reflect your current playback on Spotify. To do this, the bot checks your Spotify playback every 5 seconds to see if a track is playing or not. If there is one, it updates your bio every 30 seconds and the pinned message every 5 seconds to reflect that song. For example this is how your bio and the pinned message would look like:

Song playing:

• bio: "listening to We Will Rock You by Queen"
• pinned message: "This User (replaced with your first name) is listening to We Will Rock You by Queen."

The bot automatically accounts for when the bio message exceeds the 70-character limit. Now what happens when there's no song playing? In that case, the bot updates the two like this:

No Song playing:

• bio: the bot sets the bio to a default value saved in your Saved Messages (more on this below).
• pinned message: "This User (replaced with your first name) isn't listening to anything right now." The bot also update the picture of the pinned message to your channel's profile picture.

To revert your bio back to its default value when there is no song playing, the bot looks for a message in your Saved Messages. To set this up, go to your saved message and post a message like this:

default bio:
This is my default bio.

If you don't set this message or change the bio manually, the bot will just reset your bio to empty. Also, if you don't pin a message in your channel, the bot won't have anything to update and will check again the next time when you're playing something on Spotify.

Requires $UPDATE_PLAYBACK=true

Local Playback (This Feature Has Been Removed)

What if you're listening to music locally on your Windows PC on another media player, but want to have the bio updated nonetheless? In this case you can run the get_playing_song.py locally. This script checks to see which processes are playing audio and then checks the audio files in use by those processes. If it finds any audio files, it will send a request to your web server, informing the bot. Then the bot updates the bios accordingly.

To set this feature up, you'll need to run the web server in server.py (automatically run in Heroku), set the USING_WEB_SERVER and CHECK_LOCAL_PLAYBACK variables to True. On your PC, run handle.exe once and click Agree. Then replace the SERVER_ADDRESS variable in get_playing_song.py with the address of your server, and run it. The script will check every 2 seconds, and will send a request to the server if it determines that you're playing a song, and logs failures in failures.log in the same directory of the script.

Deploying to Heroku

Using the Deploy to Heroku button above is the easiest way to set the bot up. After clicking on the link you will enter the value of the environment variables mentioned above, and if all the values are correct the bot will set itself up and start running. If you need to change any of the environment variables, you can do so using the Config Vars section in the Settings tab.

Starting the Bot

You can start the script in two ways:

• python bot.py: Usual way to start the bot.
• python server.py: Starts a web server that updates the playlist if it receives GET requests at /update_playlist. This way is useful if you'd like to use Cron jobs to check the playlist. Set $PORT to set the port, otherwise port 5000 is used. The web server will be available at http://localhost:5000/ by default.