jlengrand.github.io/_posts/2018-04-23-automating-spotify-proxy-settings.markdown

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layout	status	published	title	author	author_login	author_email	author_url	categories	tags	comments
post	publish	true	Automating thr activation/deactivation of Spotify's proxy settings	Julien Lengrand-Lambert	jlengrand	julien@lengrand.fr	http://www.lengrand.fr	work job development	bash experiment spotify ing work startup hack

I'm a BIG fan of Spotify. I use it every day, hours on end. I like the fat client though, I find the web version way too buggy and unstable.

At ING, we use a HTTP proxy and I have configured Spotify to go through the proxy. At home, I don't use anything. This means that every day, I have to go back to my settings, disable / enable the proxy and restart Spotify. This is very annoying.

So annoying in fact that I started using the web player at home, to my disappointment.

Finally, it go me tired enough so I decided to dig deeper into the issue and find a solution. It had to be possible to automate this.

The first step was to find the location of the config file. On my Macbook, it is located in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Spotify/prefs. In this file, I saw the line : network.proxy.mode=1. The rest is child's play

Here is the final script I came out with to enable/disable spotify's proxy settings. I called it spotiProxy

#!/bin/sh

ON_OFF=$1
SPOTIFY_PREFS="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Spotify/prefs"
PROXY_ON="network.proxy.mode=2" #HTTP Proxy
PROXY_OFF="network.proxy.mode=1" #No proxy

if [ ! -f "$SPOTIFY_PREFS" ]; then
    echo "Spotify preference file not found. Exiting"
    exit 1
fi

if [ "$ON_OFF" = "on" ]
then
    echo "Activating Spotify proxy settings"
    sed -i -e "s/$PROXY_OFF/$PROXY_ON/g" "$SPOTIFY_PREFS"
elif [ "$ON_OFF" = "off" ]
then
    echo "Deactivating Spotify proxy settings"
    sed -i -e "s/$PROXY_ON/$PROXY_OFF/g" "$SPOTIFY_PREFS"
elif [ "$ON_OFF" = "show" ]
then
    cat "$SPOTIFY_PREFS"
    exit 1
else
    echo "Invalid command entered. Please use 'spotiProxy on' or 'spotiProxy off'"
    exit 1
fi

number_processes=$(pgrep Spotify | wc -l)
if [ $number_processes -gt 1 ] 
then
    echo "Restarting Spotify"
    osascript -e 'quit app "Spotify"'
    sleep 1
    open -a Spotify
fi

It's usage is very simple :

• Call it with spotiProxy on (or off)
• It will set you settings accordingly, and restart Spotify if it was already running.
• Enjoy!

This script is run automatically every time I arrive at home or at the office. Nothing to do any more. Joy!