Now Playing API

This is a simple API that's intended to be used with Cloudflare Workers. It provides a way to fetch the currently/recently played song of an arbitrary user from either Apple Music or Spotify, depending on which service is currently playing music. There's only one endpoint, /, which returns the currently playing song in JSON format.

This API is used by my personal webpage.

Response Format

On success, the API will return a JSON object with the following structure:

{
  "success": true,
  "source": "Apple Music",
  "timeStamp": "2025-07-07T04:56:04.848Z",
  "isPlaying": false,
  "duration": 180000, // Duration in milliseconds
  "title": "Love Is Everywhere",
  "artist": "Magdalena Bay",
  "album": "Imaginal Disk",
  "albumImageUrl": "https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music221/v4/8f/e3/6c/8fe36c7a-d280-2d0e-8e67-4ee0fd4523cd/810090095448.png/500x500bb.jpg",
  "songUrl": "https://music.apple.com/us/album/love-is-everywhere/1751414757?i=1751414768"
}

If there is an error, the API will return a JSON object with the following structure:

{
  "success": false,
  "isPlaying": false,
  "error": "Error Message"
}

Environment Variables

Change the .TEMPLATE.vars file to .dev.vars and fill in the required variables:

SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=
SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=
SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN=
APPLE_TEAM_ID=
APPLE_KEY_ID=
APPLE_PRIVATE_KEY=
APPLE_MUSIC_USER_TOKEN=

How to Adapt This for Your Own Use

Spotify

You need three tokens to get Spotify's currently playing song:

1. Client ID: application's unique identifier.
2. Client Secret: secret key used to authenticate your application.
3. Authorization Code: token that allows you to access the Spotify API (lasts for an hour).

First two is quite easy to obtain, with the Spotify Developer Dashboard. The authorization code is a bit more complicated, it only lasts for an hour and requires user authentication via OAuth. Once you have the token, you can make requests to the /me/player/currently-playing endpoint to get the current track information.

I would not be on my computer every hour to refresh the token, so I need another solution: Refresh Token. This token can be used to obtain a new access token without requiring user authentication again. But to get that token requires some hoops to jump through:

1. Make up a callback URL and authorize that URL on the Spotify Developer Dashboard. (I used this domain, since I know there's no /callback endppoint).
2. Fake a request to Spotify's authorization endpoint: https://accounts.spotify.com/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=CLIENT_ID&scope=user-read-currently-playing%20user-read-recently-played&redirect_uri=CALLBACK_URL
3. This will redirect you to the callback URL with a code parameter in the query, that is the authorization code.
4. Make the following request to get the actual Token:

curl -d client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID
     -d client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET
     -d grant_type=authorization_code
     -d code=CODE_FROM_URL
     -d redirect_uri=https://yourdomain.com/callback
     https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token

Apple Music

Apple Music's API is quite different. Unlike Spotify, you have to pay for an Apple Developer Account to use the MusicKit API. But once you have that it is quite easy to use. You'll need:

1. Team ID: your Apple Developer Team ID.
2. Key ID: the identifier of the key you created in the Apple Developer Portal.
3. Private Key: the private key you downloaded when you created the key in the Apple Developer Portal, it's a .p8 file.
4. Music User Token: a token that represents the user, you can get this by authenticating the user with MusicKit JS or iOS SDK. I made a static website that does it.

Steps to get those token:

1. Create a Media ID: In the sidebar, select Identifiers and click the (+) button to add a new one. Choose Media IDs from the list and click Continue.
2. Create a Private Key for MusicKit: Under Media Services, check the box for MusicKit.
3. Download Your Key and Save Your IDs: It's a .p8 file, and you will need to save the Key ID and Team ID from the Apple Developer Portal.

Cloudflare Workers

KV-Cache

This API uses two KV namespaces: RESULT_CACHE and APPLE_STATE_CACHE. These are used to cache the results of the API calls to speed things up and determine if Apple Music is playing or recently played.

npx wrangler kv namespace create "RESULT_CACHE"
npx wrangler kv namespace create "APPLE_STATE_CACHE"

Secrets

Once you have those tokens in .dev.vars, and you test your API calls, you can deploy your application using Cloudflare Workers. You'll need to put those tokens as secrets in your Cloudflare Workers environment.

npx wrangler secret put SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID
npx wrangler secret put SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET
npx wrangler secret put SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN
npx wrangler secret put APPLE_TEAM_ID
npx wrangler secret put APPLE_KEY_ID
npx wrangler secret put APPLE_PRIVATE_KEY
npx wrangler secret put APPLE_MUSIC_USER_TOKEN

Deploying

Once you have everything set up, you can deploy your application using the following command:

npx wrangler deploy

Now your API should be live and accessible at the URL provided by Cloudflare Workers.

Roadmap

• Add support for more music services (If I use ever use them)
• Add tests