Developer Onboarding Guide

[oliversalzburg]

The title might suggest something too formal. I'm really mostly looking for a list of must-have API access credentials to work comfortably. The Spotify API seems to be given, but I'm not even sure if it makes sense for me to sign up for an account right now, given their changes (that seem to apply mostly to new consumers).

Can I work on Harmony reasonably without actual Spotify API access? I'm happy to record my own steps as I figure it out, but I'd hate to sign up for premium accounts that ultimately won't work.

[kellnerd]

You don't need to have any API credentials to be able to work with Harmony. The worst that can happen is that the respective provider stops working and always shows you an error message. You can avoid that by not enabling the provider in lookups or on the settings page.

At some point I also want to make the app auto-disable providers with failed preconditions like missing credentials. There will probably be two levels: disabled for new lookups but still available for historical snapshots, and completely disabled as if the provider doesn't exist.
Ideally the app can also be configured by the server admin to completely hide certain providers.

Regarding the Spotify API specifically, it is currently still fully working (for Harmony's purposes) with a Premium account. But I wouldn't recommend paying for Premium just for the API as they will probably still disable more and more endpoints (as it stands Harmony will lose recording batch lookups, which are needed for efficient retrieval of ISRCs).