A website to make time capsule playlists of your most played Spotify tracks for the last month!
When I started college, I got the advice from a good friend to make CDs of all the songs I listened to each semester so I could listen to them years down the line and be transported back. It was a great idea (after I decided to exchange "CDs" for "playlists"), but I had a hard time remembering to keep tracks of songs as my tastes changed, and I quickly started finding holes in my self-recorded music history. To solve that problem, I created Mix Capsule.
Once you login with Spotify, Mix Capsule will deposit a playlist in your library every month containing your most listened to songs for that month. Now, whenever you want to kick back and listen to music that reminds you of the past, flip through your Mix Capsule playlists and see what you were listening to 1 month, 6 months, or even a year ago.
Mix Capsule utilizes NextJS on the frontend with Tailwind for styling, Material UI for buttons, Ionicons for icons, and Drift for live chat.
Mix Capsule uses Django and Django Rest Framework on the backend with an sqlite database.
The frontend is deployed with Vercel. The backend is deployed to a DigitalOcean droplet running an Apache webserver. Apache runs a WSGI proxy to send requests to Django. Additionally, monthly playlist creation is scheduled by systemd timers, which are preferable over cron jobs since they handle system down-time gracefully.
When interacting with the Spotify API, Mix Capsule uses the "authorization code" flow so that the backend can save a refresh token and continue to act on the user's behalf even after they've left the site. This is what allows monthly playlist creation with no intervention from the user.
Environment
cp .env.example .env
nano .env # Follow the instructions in the file to fill in secrets
source .envBackend
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
cd backend
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserverFrontend
cd frontend
npm i
npm startServices/Scripts
cd scripts
chmod +x trigger-month.sh
cd ../services
mv TriggerMonth.service.example TriggerMonth.service
nano TriggerMonth.service # Fill in missing information
sudo systemctl link /full/path/to/TriggerMonth.service
sudo systemctl enable /full/path/to/TriggerMonth.timer