I am working on a project using Spotipy that makes a lot of requests. ~18 hours ago, I presume that I hit the rate limit because I was sending a lot of requests and the code started to just stop and hang forever once it got to a line that made an API reference. After that I gave up and went to bed. ~12 hours ago I decided to rewrite the whole project since it was a mess, and so I could implement spacing out of the API requests. I also learned that I could set retries = 0 so it would throw an error rather than indefinitely hang the program. I was rewriting the project, I was only able to make 1 API request before I started getting http 429 errors every time. I left it alone for another couple of hours, until now when i tried troubleshooting some more, and the same thing happened where I was able to make one success and then it would throw errors.

restart.py:

import spotipy # type: ignore
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyOAuth # type: ignore
import time

def create_client() -> spotipy.Spotify:
    sp: spotipy.Spotify = spotipy.Spotify(
        retries=0,
        auth_manager=SpotifyOAuth(
            client_id='my_id',
            client_secret='_my_secret',
            scope='playlist-read-private playlist-modify-public playlist-modify-private',
            redirect_uri='http://localhost:8888/callback'
        )
    )
    return sp

class APIRequests:
    def __init__(self, user_id: str) -> None:
        self.recent_request: float = time.time()
        self.sp: spotipy.Spotify = create_client()
        self.user_id: str = user_id

    def get_playlist_tracks(self, playlist: str, offset: int, retries: int=0):
        delta_time = time.time() - self.recent_request
        if delta_time > 1:
            try:
                return self.sp.user_playlist_tracks(self.user_id, playlist, offset=offset, limit=100)
            except spotipy.exceptions.SpotifyException as e:
                if e.http_status == 429:
                    print(e)
                    print(e.headers.get('retry-after'))
                    print(f'retrying: waiting {(2 ** retries) * 4} seconds...')
                    time.sleep((2 ** retries) * 4)
                    retries += 1
                    return self.get_playlist_tracks(playlist, offset, retries)
                else:
                    raise e
        else:
            time.sleep(1 - delta_time)
            self.get_playlist_tracks(playlist, offset)

api_client: APIRequests = APIRequests('my_user_id')

def get_playlist_tracks(playlist: str) -> list:
    offset: int = 0
    tracks: list = []
    while True:
        print('sending request ...')
        request_batch = api_client.get_playlist_tracks(playlist, offset)
        print('request recieved')
        for track in request_batch['items']:
            tracks.append(track['track'])
        
        if not request_batch["next"]:
                break
    
    return tracks

if __name__ == '__main__':
    tracks = get_playlist_tracks('my_playlist')

    print(len(tracks))

I my rewritten code, all requests are separated by 1 second at a minimum (though it doesn’t even matter because I cant get past 1 request anyways). Additionally, upon recieving an http 429 error, it will wait an exponentially increasing amount of time before retrying. It has no effect. I have run it up to until there was 2 minutes in between attempts, and it still threw the error.

What doesn’t make sense to me is that the rate limit only applies to the number of requests made in any 30 second window. If I am waiting up to 2 minutes in between there should be absolutely no issues. If I only get error, I would have assumed that I was on some kind of 24-hour API ban or something along those lines, but being able to make 1 successfull request doesn’t make sense.

I tried with the cliend ID/secret for both of the 2 apps I have on my Spotify developer account and I had the same issue.

Am I approaching this correctly? Do I have an issue in my code? Any help is appreciated.

Additionally:

From the Spotify API Documentation:

When your app has been rate limited it will receive a 429 error response from Spotify. Your app can use this information as a cue to slow down the number of API requests that it makes to the Web API. The header of the 429 response will normally include a Retry-After header with a value in seconds. Consider waiting for the number of seconds specified in Retry-After before your app calls the Web API again.

I don’t see anything like this printed in the error message. How can I access the retry-after and would that solve my issue?