Working with the Node Red Spotify Nodes

Being able to easily and quickly integrate different workflows is at the core of Node Red. In my case that means letting hardware control what and where music is playing by simply sending a MQTT packet to my server (running mosquitto on a pi) which is monitored by Node Red.

The problem arises when working with the node-red-contrib-spotify package, which is really inconsistent with the types of input it requires and lets you guess between a list, a list of lists or a list of JSON objects. To conquer this for myself and future developers (since right now even chatGPT has no clue) I decided to put down my findings with easy to follow examples right here, right now.

Requirements

Before being able to work with the spotify api, you first gotta setup OAuth settings as explained at the bottom at the spotify-contrib page

Table of Contents

I will focus on the use cases I needed in my implementation, but if you require other API endpoints to work you can try out the different formats of input data I have shown here.

Start Playback of a Playlist

The function node right before the Spotify:play node should contain the following code in some form:

msg.params = [{
    context_uri: "spotify:playlist:0hKdgfk66xiKChBS3fuc9O" // Replacew \w playlist/album URI
}];
return msg;

So list<object>.

Change Playback Device

Although the official spotify docs tell you to provide an object with the device_ids key, in Node Red you need a list of a list.

msg.params = [["77df5afe949e308e43d4d2c8ffedf00b16c879bb"],true];
return msg;

The format is list<list,bool>, with the boolean defaulting to false and telling spotify to start playback on the new device.