DiscoveredWeekly

Discovered Weekly is a website that automatically copies your Discover Weekly Spotify playlist every week to ensure that those precious suggestions never get lost. Check out discoveredweekly.com for a free hosted version.

This repository contains all code and instructions needed to run the server as a Docker container.

1. How it works

The website is built as a Flask app and runs on Gunicorn in a Docker container. The app uses Spotipy to communicate with the Spotify API. The hosted version is built automatically on commit to the main branch using Google Cloud Build. The built Docker container is then hosted using Google Cloud Run. As the container can be shut down at any point, and multiple workers can be run, there is no real internal storage. Instead, Spotify access tokens are saved to a Google Firestore database. Google Cloud Scheduler runs a POST request weekly on Monday at 7:00 AM CEST to start the process of copying playlists for all users.

2. How to run

• Make sure you have Docker installed: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/
• Clone this repo:

git clone git@github.com:bjoernpl/DiscoveredWeekly.git

• Navigate to repo:

cd DiscoveredWeekly

• Set all necessary environment variables in envs.txt (see section 3.)
• Build and name container:

sudo docker build . -t dweekly

• Run container with port forwarding and environment variables:

sudo docker run --env-file envs.txt -p 80:8080 -it dweekly

This will have started a gunicorn worker process that can be accessed (if run locally) at 0.0.0.0.

3. Environment variables

This app needs a few variables set in envs.txt to run properly:

# Your Spotify API access data
SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=your_spotify_api_client_id
SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=your_spotify_api_client_secret

# Some password to protect the POST request for
# saving all user's playlists
SAVE_PLAYLISTS_CODE=somepassword

# Flag to enable mock Firestore database for local running
TESTING=True

# URL data for Spotify API authentication requests
BASE_URL=http://0.0.0.0
PORT=8080

4. The flow

• The landing screen serves not much more function than to inform the user what the site is about and to present a big button.
• Upon clicking that button, the user is prompted to authenticate via Spotify OAuth.
• (TODO) If the user is not following their Discover Weekly playlist, they are prompted to do so.
• The user then lands on a welcome screen and their Discover Weekly playlist is copied for the first time.
  • A playlist titled Discovered 29-2021 is created (for calender week 29).
  • A playlist titled Discovered Weekly is created where every week's suggestions will be added

TODOs:

• Add a usable README
• Code commenting
• Design the pages
• Implement prompt to follow Discover Weekly. This is necessary for the service to function.
• Implement proper opt out possibility. As of now users can only opt out by blocking access to their Spotify account via https://www.spotify.com/us/account/apps/
• Add some more error handling
• Add tests
  • Database tests
  • Spotify tests
  • API tests
• Add Open graph meta tags and share button