Spotify-Queue-Display

A simple app to display the currently playing and next few queued songs from Spotify. Displays as a floating widget that can sit above full-screen apps on Windows and MacOS.

Configuration

All the app configuration is held in appconfig.json. You will need a Spotify developer account, and will also need to have created an app on the developer dashboard. The redirect URI should be set to http://localhost:3000/callback. APIs used are Web Playback SDK and WebAPI. You'll also need to grant access for any spotify users who want to use the app.

You will also need to create a .env file with the following structure and place it in the root of the project folder before building.

SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=yourspotifyclientidgoeshere
SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=yourspotifyclientsecretgoeshere

Testing and Building

The following command will test the app locally, installing all dependencies. You will need the latest version of Node.JS installed.

npm run electron

You can package it into a self-installing standalone app using the command:

npm run build

This utilises electron-build, and by default will build for the platform you run it on (e.g. a Windows executable if run on Windows, .dmg if run on MacOS, etc.) More information can be found in the electron-builder wiki

App function

The app will start a node.js web server in the background when launched, and once that is running will launch a login process to verify that the app has permission to access the user's spotify account. This initial handshake should only need to be done once per machine.

Known issues

Build issues

• The .env file contents don't seem to be included when the app is built, resulting in the app not working. A work-around is to hard-code the clientID and client secret in main.cjs and appserver.cjs in place of the environment variable reference, prior to build. Just don't sync it back to Github!
• After building (at least on MacOS), the app launches, but the web server component doesn't seem to for some reason. Since the whole thing is essentially a web-app this is kind of a show stopper. Will need more research to fix.

Runtime issues

• You will need have Spotify actively playing a song in a playlist before you launch the app, otherwise it will display an error message inside the app window and won't refresh until you relaunch the app.