Understanding "active" devices?

[adamwfletcher]

Hi developers!

I'm trying to run a headless raspberry pi running linux as a spotify player for my 2 year old. The idea is that she can press a hardware button and it starts her playlist (and one more press stops it). 

My question is about devices. What constitutes a device? On my development environment I can start playback on an active device but it appears a device is only active when I am running spotify itself, which defeats the whole purpose of the headless one button player I'm building. 

How do I programmatically make a device active? This is on a headless linux machine, so it's not like I have spotify or even a web browser running on it. 

[Ximzend]

Hi adamwfletcher,

You can make an (headless) web app using the Web Playback SDK that runs in a browser on te Pi. This can be controlled through both a Spotify app, and the Spotify Web API.

Hope this helps.

[adamwfletcher]

Would the idea then be to run a headless chrome instance and have that loads spotify, which then creates an active device, and have my daemon use that device? Or just load a web app that by virtue of it being a webapp creates an active device on webapp load?

[Ximzend]

You can not make the Spotify web app active, but you can make an instance of the Web Playback SDK active.