alt-spotify

A server and sanple code for using the Spotify API

Installation

As usual, just run

npm install

Running the Sample Code

First, create an app in Spotify.

Now, you can grab that application's clientId and clientSecret from the app's Dashboard. Never show these two to anybody (although the clientID can be exposed).

Set environment variables in the command line, using export in Unix, and set in Windows:

export CLIENT_ID=...
export CLIENT_SECRET=...

Or, in Windows:

set CLIENT_ID=...
set CLIENT_SECRET=...

Now, you can just run npm start, and open the UI in http://localhost:5000.

In the UI, click the "login" link, which will prompt you to authorize your new app. Once it's authorized, it will go back to that page, but this time, will also show the list of yout "favorite/library" albums (at least the first 20 of them).

Using the server with your own UI

First, run the server, with the environment variables CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, and BASE_URL.

The CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET are the id and secret of your app, as can be found in the Spotify Dashboard of your app.

The BASE_URL is the base url of which URL the server is located at, from the browser's perspective (e.g. http://localhost:5000 or https://my-app).

Logging In/Authorizing the APP

To login a user, just link to BASE_URL/authorize&scope=...&redirect=.... The user will be prompted to authorize the app accordint to the (space separated) scopes provides, and the browser will finally redirect to the url in the redirect query parameter, with the accessToken, expiresIn, and userId query parameters added to it.

• accessToken: the token that you should use in all your API calls to Spotify. This token will expire in expiresIn seconds, but you can refresh it with a call to BASE_URL/refresh?accessToken=... (see below).
• expiresIn: the number of seconds till accessToken expires
• userId: the user id of the user

Refreshing the token

To refresh the token, before it expires in expiresIn seconds (see above), you should POST a call to BASE_URL/refresh?accessToken=... with the access token received from /authorize above. The JSON returned will have these properties:

• accessToken: the new access token to be used in Spotify API-s, replacing the one used till now.
• expiresIn: the number of seconds till the new accessToken expires