spotipy: "401 error: The access token expired" when using SpotifyClientCredentials

@ritiek Now it works, thanks for the help.

Great, thank you! You should have received the invite from @plamere

The goal is to automate RTD + PyPi deployments from a single account, but if needed we can still request it later

Sure, thanks! That would be very nice.

@Biggerandreas You don’t need to feed your refreshed token to Main.spot(). Main.refresh_token() automatically take cares of that with self.sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=new_token['access_token']).

You could just reduce your except block to:

except spotipy.client.SpotifyException:
	main.refresh_token()
	print("Got an exception ")

When your token expires (after 1 hour), your code will raise an exception spotipy.client.SpotifyException which will cause Main.refresh_token() to execute which should refresh your instance of spotipy.Spotify() with your newly refreshed token, so the script should keep working fine.

In any case, shouldn’t spotipy handle this internally?

@rinze Yep, it would nice to have an optional argument to spotipy.Spotify(auto_refresh=True) which would automatically refresh token once it expires. I don’t see any active development on spotipy, so can’t say how long before anything like this happens.

@Biggerandreas Actually, there are couple of things you need to fix with your code. I’ll try to explain my best. 😃

---

• You are calling Main.refresh_token() unnecessarily at multiple places, which would slow down your script. We only need to call it when a spotipy.client.SpotifyException is raised. You should remove calling it from any other place.
• As spotipy.client.SpotifyException is raised when the token expires, we don’t need to check it again in Main.refresh_token(). So, we can reduce Main.refresh_token() to something below:

    def refresh_token(self):
        cached_token = self.spo.get_cached_token()
        refreshed_token = cached_token['refresh_token']
        new_token = self.spo.refresh_access_token(refreshed_token)
        # also we need to specifically pass `auth=new_token['access_token']`
        self.sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=new_token['access_token'])
        return new_token

You could then just call main.refresh_token() in your except block which should refresh token.

• In your main loop, you should place main.get_song() under try block otherwise we cannot catch any exception it raises (in our case, we want to catch spotipy.client.SpotifyException).
• You are also trying to subtract 2 different times in str which is not possible. Consider:

import time
time_started = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
current_time = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
print(time_started - current_time)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "timi.py", line 4, in <module>
    print(time_started - current_time)
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'str' and 'str'

As a workaround, we can convert them to datetime.datetime objects and then subtract them:

from datetime import datetime
import time
fmt = "%Y-%m-d %H:%M:%S"
time_started = time.strftime(fmt)
current_time = time.strftime(fmt)
# also i think you meant `current_time - time_started` and not other way round
print(datetime.strptime(current_time, fmt) - datetime.strptime(time_started, fmt))

---

That should clear most stuff. Let me know if anything is still not right. 😃

@Biggerandreas That should not be happening, I’ve been using something similar without problems. Do you mind sharing relevant code from your script here? (removing any credentials of course)

@Biggerandreas You can use something like this to catch exception raised when the token expires:

try:
    do_something()
except spotipy.client.SpotifyException:
    # re-authenticate when token expires
    token = ...
    sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=token)
    do_something()