I built a Spotify recently-played banner for GitHub — without registering an OAuth app

I run most of my own infrastructure, so depending on someone else's hosted service for a README widget felt wrong. And most "Spotify for GitHub README" projects share the same setup story: go to the Spotify developer dashboard, register an app, grab a client ID and secret, plug them into some hosted service, authorize it, and hope the maintainer keeps the server running.

I wanted something self-hosted, with no developer app registration at all. So I dug into how the Spotify web player authenticates — and it turns out there's a cleaner path.

The trick: sp_dc + PKCE

When you log into open.spotify.com, your browser gets an sp_dc session cookie. The web player uses this cookie to silently drive the full PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) authorization flow and obtain a short-lived bearer token — without any client secret.

The key endpoint is:

GET https://accounts.spotify.com/oauth2/v2/auth
  ?response_type=code
  &client_id=<spotify_web_player_client_id>
  &scope=user-read-recently-played ...
  &redirect_uri=https://developer.spotify.com
  &code_challenge=<sha256_of_verifier>
  &code_challenge_method=S256
  &response_mode=web_message
  &prompt=none
Cookie: sp_dc=<your_cookie>

With prompt=none and a valid sp_dc, Spotify returns an authorization code directly in the response body — no browser redirect, no user interaction. You then exchange that code (plus the PKCE verifier) for a bearer token, and you're in.

The whole auth chain in one line:

sp_dc cookie → PKCE flow → bearer token → /v1/me/player/recently-played → SVG

The implementation

The server is written in Go. A few things worth pointing out:

Token caching with mutex safety

Hitting the auth endpoint on every request would be slow and rate-limitable. The token is cached globally and protected with a sync.Mutex:

var (
    cachedToken string
    tokenMu     sync.Mutex
)

func getCachedToken() (string, error) {
    tokenMu.Lock()
    defer tokenMu.Unlock()
    if cachedToken == "" {
        token, err := getToken()
        if err != nil {
            return "", fmt.Errorf("getting token: %w", err)
        }
        cachedToken = token
    }
    return cachedToken, nil
}

Auto-refresh on non-200

Bearer tokens expire. Rather than tracking expiry times, the server just invalidates the cache whenever the Spotify API returns a non-200 and retries once:

for attempt := 0; attempt < 2; attempt++ {
    token, err := getCachedToken()
    // ... make the API call ...
    if res.StatusCode != http.StatusOK {
        res.Body.Close()
        invalidateToken()
        continue
    }
    // decode and return
}

Simple and works well in practice.

Bypassing GitHub's Camo proxy cache

GitHub proxies all images through Camo, its image CDN, which aggressively caches responses. Without the right headers, your banner would show stale data for hours. The fix is straightforward:

w.Header().Add("Cache-Control", "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")

This tells Camo not to cache the response, so every README load fetches a fresh SVG.

What it looks like

The current SVG design is intentionally minimal — a dark Spotify-green card listing your 20 most recently played tracks with numbered rows.

There's room to make it much better: album art, artist names, play counts, theme variants. Contributions welcome.

Running it yourself

git clone https://github.com/lsnnt/spotify-banner-for-github
cd spotify-banner-for-github

Get your sp_dc cookie from DevTools → Application → Cookies on open.spotify.com, then:

echo 'SPDC="your_cookie_here"' > .env
go build . && ./spotify-banner-for-github

Visit http://localhost:8080/ — you should see your recently played tracks rendered as an SVG.

To embed it in your GitHub README, deploy it to any publicly reachable server and add:

![Spotify recently played](https://your-server.example.com/)

A note on sp_dc

The sp_dc cookie is a long-lived session credential. Treat it like a password — don't commit your .env, and rotate it by logging out and back into the web player. This approach is unofficial and intended for personal, non-commercial use.

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The full source is on GitHub: lsnnt/spotify-banner-for-github

If you like it do star the Repo.

If you want to improve the SVG design or add album art support, open a PR — that's the part that needs the most work right now.