archen2019 / track-spotify-plays

Lambda function to log my recently played songs from Spotify

Track Spotify Plays

A lambda function I run every twenty minutes via AWS Cloudwatch Events to make a persistent log of my Spotify listening history. For those "what was that song I was listening to?" moments.

Installation

To run this, you'll need to set up...

• DynamoDB
• A Spotify Application
• AWS Lambda

Someone contributing a SAM config or something to automate this would be most welcome!

DynamoDB Setup

You'll need to set up a DynamoDB table named spotify-plays with played_at as the partition key.

Spotify Application Setup

First, register a new Spotify application. Make note of the Client ID and Client Secret - you'll need them later.

Now you need to generate an auth token for your Spotify user, so that you can query the API for data specific to your account. There's probably a better way to do this (contributions welcome!), but I cheat and do the following:

• Set my application's Redirect URIs to http://localhost:8888/callback
• Set up a fake webserver on port 8888 using nc -l localhost 8888
• Visit https://accounts.spotify.com/authorize?client_id=$SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID&response_type=code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8888/callback&scope=user-read-recently-played in my browser
• Make note of the code transmitted to nc
• Use curl to ask for a refresh token: curl -X POST -d client_id=$SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID -d client_secret=$SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET -d grant_type=authorization_code -d code=$code -d redirect_uri=http://localhost:8888/callback https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token
• Make note of the refresh_token in the response from curl - you'll need it in a bit.

Lambda Setup

Set up a new Lambda function using Python 3. I uploaded the code as a zip, including its dependencies, like so:

$ pip install -t . -r requirements.txt
$ zip -r /tmp/app.zip *

You'll need to create the following environment variables - these correspond to the values I told you to keep track of earlier:

• SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN
• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID
• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET

You'll need to use KMS to encrypt these values (since the code assumes they're encrypted).

Finally, you'll want to set up a CloudWatch Event to trigger the function every so often - I set mine to trigger every twenty minutes.