Spotify Desktop Adblocker
This project uses a proxy to strip all ad-related requests from the Spotify desktop application. This should work for all major operating systems, but if you are using Linux, I would advise you to use this instead.
Installation & Usage Instructions
Click to expand for installation & usage.
Open desktop Spotify, open the dropdown from the top-right, and open settings. Scroll all the way down settings and find "Proxy" (you may need to look under Advanced Settings).
Configure it as shown:
Run the following commands in terminal to clone and install.
> git clone https://github.com/AnanthVivekanand/spotify-adblock.git && cd spotify-adblock
...
> npm i
Then start the proxy by running node mitm.js, which allows it to generate some certificates. Then, trust the
root certificate at certs/certs/ca.crt
On MacOS, you can trust the root certficate with one command: sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain certs/certs/ca.crt
After trusting, run node mitm.js to start the proxy again. You should see something similar to the image below.
mitm.js is recommended over filter-domains.js (previously index.js). filter-domains.js will not be maintained. Read below on why mitm.js is preferred.
How it works
mitm.js uses a Man-In-The-Middle proxy to decrypt SSL connections and filter out ad-related urls and domains. All spotify requests go to our locally hosted proxy, and mitm.js is able to view the domain that each request is for, and the associated full url. With this, it's able to determine whether to allow the request through based off the rules in mitm-utils/whitelist-mitm.js and mitm-utils/blacklist-mitm.js. On the first run, mitm.js generates a Root Certificate Authority (CA), which needs to be trusted by the OS.
filter-domains.js does the same without SSL-decryption, so it does not require CA trusting, but it is not able to filter all ads since it can only filter by domains, not the exact url. Some domains, like spclient.wg.spotify.com serve both ads and Spotify functionality, so this is a problem for filter-domains.js. One upside is that it does not require trusting the Root CA, so it can be used on computers where you do not have the ability to trust a CA.
Docker image
To build an image for the MITM proxy, simply run npm run docker-mitm, and then create a container binding the port 8082 and the folder /usr/src/app/certs to the host to get access to the certificates.
The port 8082 is exposed by Docker for easier setup using a reverse-proxy.
For example:
docker run -d --name=Spotify-adblock --volume=/opt/spotify-adblock/certs:/usr/src/app/certs -p 8082:8082 --restart=always spotify-adblock:latest
,where /opt/spotify-adblock/certs is the path on the host machine where you will find the certificates you need to import.