Soundcloud Pulse

A Slack App that will crawl a specific Soundcloud User and post stats of how their tracks are doing into a channel.

Set up

1. Create config.json in config/ and supply these values. You can also duplicate and create a config.test.json if you wish to test into a different webhook.

{
  "SOUNDCLOUD_USER_ID": "",
  "CLIENT_ID": "",
  "APP_VERSION": "",
  "SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL": ""
}

2. If you need help obtaining these values, go into the Network tab when you visit your Soundcloud profile and you should be able to find a request that makes such a call (filter by api-v2.soundcloud.com). These calls will have the parameters client_id and app_version passed. See the image below

3. Set up your Webhook URL in your Slack team. You can do this by going to Your Apps, creating a new App, and then adding a new Incoming Webhook.
4. Run npm install in this repository.
5. Assuming you have done all the steps above, run npm run start and you should send a Slack message to the channel you chose when setting up your Webhook URL above.
6. If you wish to have this run on a weekly or monthly basis, you can set up a cron job and have it run the command. My crontab file looks like below and you can access via sudo crontab -e and will run Monday 8 AM every week

NODE_PATH=/home/pi/.npm/lib/node_modules
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
0 8 * * 1 /usr/local/bin/npm start --prefix /home/pi/slack-soundcloud-pulse >/dev/null 2>&1

Troubleshooting and other Notes

• The client_id value gets refreshed every so often so you may need to verify you have the right client_id. I have not pinpointed how often this refresh happens but it seems every few months it can refresh.
• Make sure you specify NODE_PATH and PATH in your crontab in order for it to run. See here
• If you need to verify your cron job is working, you can do a grep CRON /var/log/syslog and see if your job is running.
• Sometimes it's nice to be able to test and send Slack attachment results to a test Slack channel. I have created an issue to do this see issue #4.

Helpful links

• Soundcloud API guide
• Slack Attachment Message Builder
• Crontab Generator