Spotify API

Praveen Chaudhary

3 min readJul 2, 2021

It is a class based API. It makes multiple get request with the Spotify.

How the code works :-

Libraries required

import base64
import requests
import datetime
from urllib.parse import urlencode

Get your API credentials from Spotify developer account

client_id = ‘client id’
client_key = “enter the key”

Initialize the client

class SpotifyApi(object):
access_token = None
access_token_expires = datetime.datetime.now()
access_token_did_expires = True
client_id = None
client_key = None
token_url = ‘https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token'

Authentication

def __init__(self, client_id, client_key, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.client_id = client_id
self.client_key = client_key

# Converting the credentials to base64 encoding

def get_token_header(self):
cred_base64 = self.get_client_credentials()
return {
“Authorization”: f’Basic {cred_base64}’
}

# Checking if credentials is supplied or not

def get_client_credentials(self):
client_id = self.client_id
client_key = self.client_key
if client_key == None or client_key == None:
raise Exception(“you must set the client credentials”)
cred = f’{client_id}:{client_key}’
cred_base64 = base64.b64encode(cred.encode())
return cred_base64.decode()

# Getting token data

def get_token_data(self):
return {
“grant_type”: “client_credentials”
}

# Performing authentication

def perform_auth(self):
token_url = self.token_url
token_data = self.get_token_data()
token_header = self.get_token_header()
r = requests.post(token_url, data=token_data, headers=token_header)
if r.status_code not in range(200, 299):
return False
token_response_data = r.json()
now = datetime.datetime.now()
expires_in = token_response_data[‘expires_in’]
expires = now + datetime.timedelta(seconds=expires_in)
self.access_token_expires = expires
self.access_token_did_expires = expires < now
self.access_token = token_response_data[‘access_token’]
return True

# Getting access token

def get_access_token(self):
token = self.access_token
expires = self.access_token_expires
now = datetime.datetime.now()
if expires < now:
self.perform_auth()
return self.get_access_token()
elif token is None:
self.perform_auth()
return self.get_access_token()
return token

How to setup the API :-

First install requirements.txt by :- python3 install -r requirements.txt
Enter the client id and secret key that you have to get from the Spotify developer account in the "spotify_api.py".
Make an object of the class to use methods.
Example:-
spotify = SpotifyApi()
Then you have to perform authentication for getting the access token. An access token is used to make a get request. One need to understand that access token has an expiry time i.e. 3600 seconds for version 1 now. But your class automatically manages that work for you. It will regenerate the token if it expires. So you don’t need to worry about it at all. Running authentication is a one time process. For authentication simply run :-
spotify.perform_auth()

How to use the API:

Now you can start using the methods or get requests as shown below :-
spotify.search(query, operator=None, operator_query=None, search_type="type")
Where :-
query = It can be anything, depending on the type of search. For search type like artist, it can be Neha Kakkar, Honey Singh, Raaftar etc.
search_type = spotify provides different type of searches like by artists, albums or tracks.
operator = Spotify provides two type of operators, i.e "OR" and "NOT". NOT operator means exclude it. OR operator means anyone of both.
operator_query = means anything you want to exclude or to make an option. Example :-
songs=spotify.search("Tony", operator="not" , operator_query="Kakkar", search_type="artist")
The above code will search for tony, but it will neglect the results which contains the Kakkar in their title.
You can even search for the track in the similar way for track. Example :-
spotify.search(Time, search_type="track")