Recently, I created a tiny script called spotify-cli, which allows you to control Spotify on Linux from terminal. It’s inspired by shpotify, which is a shell script doing similar things, but on macOS. My script is written in Python and uses dbus under the hood, which allows to communicate with bus daemon to pass messages between applications. I used pactl for controlling the system sound.

You can install spotify-cli as follows via wget:

sh -c "$(wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pwittchen/spotify-cli-linux/master/install.sh -O -)"

or via curl:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pwittchen/spotify-cli-linux/master/install.sh)"

After that, you can just type spotifycli in your terminal. You can use spotifycli with the following parameters:

--help, -h          shows help
--status            shows status (currently played song name and artist)
--status-short      shows status in a short way (cuts currently played song name and artist)
--play              plays the song
--pause             pauses the song
--playpause         plays or pauses the song (toggles a state)
--next              plays the next song
--prev              plays the previous song
--volumeup          increases sound volume
--volumedown        decreases sound volume

That’s it! Happy listening!

Source code of the project can be found at https://github.com/pwittchen/spotify-cli-linux.