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cbc-radio-2-spotify

A project to get CBC Music (CBC Radio 2) onto a dynamically generated Spotify playlist using an AWS Lambda scheduled task. Everyday a playlist for each of CBC Music's programs will be created.

Setup

Environment setup

# Clone and navigate to the repo
$ git clone https://github.com/jeffjyang/cbc-radio-2-spotify.git
$ cd cbc-radio-2-spotify

# Create your Python virtual environment
$ python3 -m venv env

# Start the virtual environment
$ source env/bin/activate

# Install dependencies  
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

To shutdown the virtual environment, run

$ deactivate

Spotify setup

  1. Create a Spotify developer account https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/
  2. On the dashboard click "CREATE A CLIENT ID", and follow the prompts
  3. Into config.py, paste your Client ID and Client Secret, and your Spotify username.
  4. Go to your Spotify account and create 10 empty playlists
  5. For each of your playlists paste the playlist id into config.py
  6. Run $ python3 spotify_token_cli_tool.py to generate a Spotify access token that will be used by the script

AWS setup

IAM user

  1. Login to your AWS Management Console as root
  2. Create an IAM user with AWSLambdaExecute permissions
  3. Create an access key for the IAM user and paste the credentials into config.py

S3

  1. Create an S3 bucket and give read and write permissions to your IAM user. Follow the guide in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/acct-identifiers.html to get the canonical user ID for your IAM user
  2. Paste the name of your bucket into config.py

Lambda

  1. Create a Python 3.6 runtime AWS Lambda function
  2. Set the timeout of the Lambda function to a few minutes
    • This script tends to take roughly 1 to 2 minutes to execute
  3. Add an CloudWatch Events trigger with the following scheduled rule: cron(0 7 * * ? *)
    • Note this is assuming PDT timezone

Deployment

To run the script on your local machine, run $ python3 lambda_cli_tool.py

To deploy to Lambda, run $ bash deploy.sh

Discussion

The need to create 10 Spotify playlists

Spotipy, the Python client library for Spotify's API, does not support getting the playlist_id of a Spotify playlist. This is an issue since Spotipy requires a playlist's playlist_id in order to populate it with tracks.

As well, Spotify's API does not support the deletion of playlists. Since the number of programs on CBC Music may differ each day, it is inevitable that we will end up with unused playlists on days where CBC Music has fewer programs.

By creating a list of Spotify playlists, we can provide Spotipy a number of playlist_id's to use when we want to add tracks to a playlist. Now, instead of requiring Spotipy to create playlists itself, it can simply rename a playlist from "Inactive" to the title of one of CBC Music's programs when it wants to add tracks to it. Likewise, if Spotipy wants to "delete" a playlist, it can simply remove all tracks from the playlist and rename it to "Inactive".

The choice of creating 10 playlists is to ensure that we will not run out of playlists to use on days where CBC Music has a relatively large number of programs. This tends to be about 8 programs per day.