Access Token not working

Hi,

My access tokens do not seem to be set correctly. My code is taken from the example (and I have relplaced my id & secret):

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

var clientId = 'myclientid',
    clientSecret = 'myclientsecret';

var spotifyApi = new SpotifyWebApi({
  clientId : clientId,
  clientSecret : clientSecret
});

spotifyApi.clientCredentialsGrant()
  .then(function(data) {
    console.log('The access token expires in ' + data.body['expires_in']);
    console.log('The access token is ' + data.body['access_token']);
    spotifyApi.setAccessToken(data.body['access_token']);
  }, function(err) {
        console.log('Something went wrong when retrieving an access token', err);
  });

I receive the access token and expiration time, but then if I attempt to search for songs/artists/related artists/anything else, I also receive: { [WebapiError: Unauthorized] name: 'WebapiError', message: 'Unauthorized', statusCode: 401 } even though the setAccessToken has been completed.

Furthermore, unlike the other closed issues similar to this, the searches that I am attempting should not require any scopes as they require no user data.

Any help appreciated 😃

[prashanthr]

Yes. I’ve had success with this. I use a helper in my app to handle the credential flow.

let spotify = new SpotifyWebApi({
  clientId: 'YOUR_CLIENT_ID'
  clientSecret: 'YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET',
  redirectUri: 'YOUR_REDIRECT_URI'
})

  // Can wrap the following methods in a class for ease of use
  async initialize () {
    const token = await getToken()
    spotify.setAccessToken(token)
  }

  async refreshToken () {
    const token = await getRefreshToken()
    spotify.setAccessToken(token)
  }

  async getToken () {
    const result = await spotify.clientCredentialsGrant()
    return result.body.access_token
  }
  
  async getRefreshToken () {
    const result = await spotify.refreshAccessToken()
    return result.body.access_token
  }

  async useApi () {
    // initialize or refreshToken as desired
   await spotify.initialize()
    // use api 
    await spotify.search(....)
  }

[prashanthr]

@SnowPrimate You’re welcome! Yes that is the right idea. To build a completely stateless application that does what you want when you run it or on schedule, you’ll need to save your refresh token once and inject it into your app or program on start/whenever it runs. Possible options to store this are:

• in an environment variable
• a file
• or in a database that can be read from on startup

Here’s the general idea

1. On start, load an access token and refresh token from your preferred storage source (assuming you’ve done the credentials grant manually once)
2. Create a SpotifyWebApi instance (using this library) aka let instance = new SpotifyWebApi({...})
3. Execute a test request to the Spotify API (you can use any simple API call, even a search)
4. If you get a 401, refresh the token by calling instance.refreshAccessToken() and set the access token on the SpotifyWebApi instance instance.setAccessToken(access_token). Else proceed to next step on a 2xx response.
5. Do what you need to do by calling APIs to load up your playlist. Remember to batch your requests by limiting to 100 as you can’t fetch more than 100 results in a single API call.
6. Lifecycle end - Your program ends but when it starts up again the access token would have expired, but luckily your refresh token hasn’t so it will repeat from step 1 successfully.

Refs:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30372835/how-can-i-increase-the-expiry-time-of-spotify-token
• https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Partners-Web-Player-etc/API-Access-token-expired/td-p/4695256#:~:text=The access tokens expire after,This is a security measure.
• https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/authorization-guide/#accessing-your-data-without-showing-a-login-form