votify crashes on startup: 404 fetching spotify-secrets JSON → requests.exceptions.HTTPError

[frozenisback]

Summary
votify currently crashes on initialization with a requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 caused by a hardcoded external URL that no longer exists:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Thereallo1026/spotify-secrets/refs/heads/main/secrets/secretDict.json

This stops the TOTP class from initializing and prevents any further operation (rc=1). This looks like a repo/file deletion on GitHub and votify does not gracefully handle that condition.

Reproduction steps

1. Install votify (or use existing copy).
2. Run any votify command that triggers initialization, e.g.: try to download a track:
3. Observe the exception and crash.

Observed behavior
votify exits with traceback similar to:
requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 Client Error: Not Found for url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Thereallo1026/spotify-secrets/refs/heads/main/secrets/secretDict.json
...
File ".../votify/totp.py", line XX, in get_latest_secret
response.raise_for_status()

Expected behavior
If an external secret repository is missing or unreachable, votify should:

• Not crash on startup.
• Fall back to a safe behavior (e.g., try to continue without TOTP, skip privileged endpoints, or provide a user-visible error advising about degraded functionality).
• Ideally attempt graceful fallbacks (cookie-based auth, prompt for credentials, or YouTube resolution) instead of failing hard.

[kustbots]

facing the same issue

[MolagBally]

same for me

[yashikada]

you can read the story of what happened here.
However, there are many mirrors on GitHub, so it can be easily fixed.

[matthewyang204]

Okay, and then I tried it with ar5hil's mirror of it. However, it now instead gives a huge chonky error:

Exception: Request failed with status code 400: {"totpVerExpired":"error","totpValidUntil":"2025-10-18T09:00:00.000Z","error":{"code":400,"message":"Unauthorized request","extra":{"_notes":"Usage of this endpoint is not permitted under the Spotify Developer Terms and Developer Policy, and applicable law"}{...}

Sorry about the {...}, but that's actually what I believe to be binary data, and it's probably sensitive, so I'm going to exclude it. But you get the idea...

Anyways, been working on it from my fork. This has gotten irritating lately as I wanted to download a few Spotify albums again.

[SpyrosMourelatos]

@matthewyang204 unfortunately, this also doesn't work :
SPOTIFY_SECRETS_JSON = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ar5hil/spotify-secrets/refs/heads/main/secrets/secretDict.json" Spotify is crazy on putting source code down, I would like some help finding this code

[matthewyang204]

Yeah. I tried it and it didn't work. Apparently all it returns is "illegal usage" or something instead of the thing. Spotify is actually insane. If even the most closed company, Apple, allows this, then something is seriously wrong here.

[pandamoon21]

From a repo, https://code.thetadev.de/ThetaDev/spotify-secrets/raw/branch/main/secrets/secretDict.json

[ChristopherTheBoss]

you can read the story of what happened here. However, there are many mirrors on GitHub, so it can be easily fixed.

thanks for the link, i read the post. it's absurd. i'm a spotify user and i get rate limited for MAKING PLAYLISTS WITHIN THEIR TOS. sure i have over 10k playlists...but lmfao i pay for premium. i was a pirate but got on disability n33tbux and decided to be legit ironically.

i legit have 10 seconds of delay using their UI normally. and i know it isn't network latency because other sites are perfectly responsive.

spotify is dogwater. they pollute song titles with remaster year.

what other grievances...oh yeah rn i just want to search the lyrics of my liked songs. i'm on 4 hours of sleep and have a song in my head that goes
'won't you please
stay a while'
female vocals
kinda electronic

on the brink of kms

right lmfao the first thing i wanted say in writing this was that spotify's library was originally filled with pirated music.

[matthewyang204]

Yeah, they're now basically killing themselves in order to stop "pirates" from downloading stuff from them. Also, it's perfectly legal to download from a streaming service so long as they say you "own" the stuff in your library. Then all you need to do is add it to your library and download it, and you get away in legal terms scot-free.

But anyways, yeah Spotify is basically killing themselves to stop people from downloading the music so bad. When did the UI in the app become more unresponsive? I bet it corresponds to the date that they stopped the secretDict.json from working...