Spotify API Blackboard

Intro

As a pianist musician with an online streaming catalog, Spotify was naturally what I explored when I first started learning about APIs.

This project is a 'blackboard' because I use it for general purposes like drafting code or retrieving data as and when. It was initially an automation script which I plan to post soon, but I have since made a separate repo and Spotify client ID for it, as I wanted to have a dedicated place to write random code for interacting with Spotify's web API.

Getting Started

1. Create App

Login to Spotify for Developers and click on 'Create app' in your dashboard.
Fill in required fields:
1. App name (can be anything)
2. App description (can be anything)
3. Redirect URI: http://localhost:8080/callback
Go to your newly created app settings and note the following:
1. Client ID
2. Client Secret

2. Configure settings.py

Fill in your CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET:
```
# Example
CLIENT_ID = 'abc-my-client-id-123'
CLIENT_SECRET = 'abc-my-client-secret-123'
```
I have also provided a .env template file to use with load_dotenv().
Make sure redirect_uri is the same as the one you entered in your app.
Depending on the data you want to retrieve, you may need to fill in scopes. This determines what kind of data your app is allowed access to. If you need more than the two I've provided as the default, a list of scopes can be found here.

3. Authorize App

Run oauth.py in your terminal / cmd.
In the opened web browser, login to your Spotify account if you haven't already.
Click 'Agree' to grant the relevant access permissions to your app.
In the address bar, copy everything after code= and paste it in the terminal.
Hit enter. If all went well, you should see your token details printed.

Go to Blackboard.py and start writing code!

The access token expires in 60 mins, but you will not have to worry about this as I have coded it in such a way that it will refresh whenever required.

Usage (functions.py)

Most of the functions will require a Spotify ID as its first argument.

# Example
myself = get_artist('22characters-SpotifyID')
custom_printer.pprint(myself)

my_name = myself['name']
my_followers = myself['followers']['total']
my_pop = myself['popularity']

print(
    f'I am {my_name} and I have {int(my_followers)} followers! '
    f'My popularity index is {my_pop}! Am I famous yet??'
)

There are currently about 10 functions for use, but I may include more.

Extra Thoughts

One thing I found interesting while working on this and exploring Spotify's API was that there is actually such a thing as a popularity metric. I googled this and apparently it is called the 'popularity index'. Admittedly, I check my popularity index from time to time. 😅
I know there is already another library (Spotipy) that does what I'm doing here, but I figured I would learn a lot more if I coded this from scratch with just the requests library. I've also gained a better understanding of the oauth process through writing this. Plus, it was fun anyway. 😁

jeremyngcode/Spotify-API-Blackboard