DE | Express Spotify Searcher

Introduction

Spotify is a super cool music streaming service that provides you access to tons of music without ever having to buy an album.

Today, we're going to build an Express app to search spotify for artists, albums, and tracks. In addition, we'll be able to play a preview of some of these songs.

To see the final product check out the deployed version: https://iron-spotify.herokuapp.com/.

It may seem like a lot, but let's break it down into steps!

spotify-web-api-node

Spotify is great for streaming music from the app, but they also have a Web Service for us developers to play with.

We don't need to delve too deeply into what an API is until later, thanks to the npm package spotify-web-api-node. This package gives us simple methods to make requests to Spotify, and give us back artists, albums, tracks, and more.

First, create a new folder, and set up your package.json:

$ mkdir express-spotify-app && cd express-spotify-app
$ npm init
$ npm install --save spotify-web-api-node prettyjson
$ touch app.js

const SpotifyWebApi   = require('spotify-web-api-node');
const spotify         = new SpotifyWebApi();

spotify.searchArtists("The Beatles", {}, (err, data) => {
  if (err) throw err;

  let artists = data.body.artists.items;
  console.log(artists)
});

The object that Spotify sends us is huge. Let's open the node Chrome inspector to check it out:

node --inspect --debug-brk app.js

data.body.artists.items is an array of objects, those objects being different artists.

Why an array?

Well, when you search for "Kanye West", it will return a list of artists close to that name: ie "Kanye Best", and "Kanye West ft. T-Pain".

Let's take a look at that object:

Included with the Artist object is the name, id, images, and much more. The album and tracks returned are in a very similar structure.

:::danger :fire: Styling should be the last thing you focus on. Functionality first this module! :::

Iteration 0 | Setup

We've already set up our package.json, and app.js. You should set up an Express app with all of the packages we've used thusfar.

Your directory should look like this once you're done:

├── app.js
├── package.json
├── public
│   ├── public/images
│   ├── public/javascripts
│   └── public/stylesheets
│       └── public/stylesheets/style.css
└── views
    ├── views/layouts

You should also have the following packages installed:

  "dependencies": {
    "body-parser": "~1.15.2",
    "ejs": "~2.5.2",
    "express": "~4.14.0",
    "express-ejs-layouts": "^2.2.0",
    "morgan": "~1.7.0",
    "spotify-web-api-node": "^2.3.6"
  }

Iteration 1 | Search for an Artist

Step 1 | Create a Homepage

Create a simple home page. You'll need a basic index route, that renders a home page.

On this page, you should have a search form. This form should direct its query to /artists, and have one input with a name of artist.


Step 2 | Display results for artist search

Create the route /artists. This route will receive the search term from the query parameters, and make a search request using the Spotify Package.

Display the name, an image, and a button to show the albums for a particular artist on a new view.


Iteration 2 | View Albums

When someone clicks on the "View Albums" button, they should be taken to a page to show all of the albums for that particular artist.

:::info :zap: Check out the getArtistAlbums method in the spotify-web-api-node package. :::

Hint

You're going to need to use ejs inside of the "View Albums" link to create an href.

Your route should look like the following:

app.get('/albums/:artistId', (req, res) => {
  // code
});

Meaning that your href for the view more button is going to have to look like this:

<a href="/albums/1UarLtyjvxGiRTsfFXxtnA">View More</a>

1UarLtyjvxGiRTsfFXxtnA is a unique ID for a particular artist. Replace that with ejs to make it dynamic!

Iteration 3 | View Tracks

Make the "View Tracks" button work on the albums page. This page should take you to a page with a list of all of the tracks on a particular album.

:::info :zap: Check out the getAlbumTracks method in the spotify-web-api-node package. :::

A track object comes with a preview_url, which is the source for a 30 second preview of a particular song. You can plug this into an HTML audio tag, and it will play the preview.

Requirements

• 4 Pages with artist / album / track information populated from Spotify
  • Home
  • Artists
  • Albums
  • Tracks
• Basic dev level logging with Morgan
• Some styling, it doesn't have to look like the example.
• A layout

Happy Coding!