Get your Pocket Casts data using the unofficial API and PHP

By Mike Street

2023-10-03T00:00:00.000Z Posted on 3rd October 2023. 3 mins reading time

Pocket Casts is a Android podcast player I've been using for some time. I wanted a method of extracting podcasts I had listened to to gather some stats and keep a history of my podcasts.

Pocket Casts doesn't offer an official API, unfortunately, but does have some data available on https://api.pocketcasts.com - which I assume is what the web application uses to get data behind the scenes.

Using hints from the pocketcasts NPM package, I backwards engineered the code below which requires "logging in" and then accessing other endpoints with a Bearer token.

For the code below to work, you need to have access to the web player which, at the time of writing, needs "Pocket Casts Plus" - the paid-for service

https://api.pocketcasts.com/user/login

This can be achieved using cURL:

// Initialize cURL
$ch = curl_init('https://api.pocketcasts.com/user/login');
// Set the request method to POST
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
// Set the POST data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
// Set the response format to plain text
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Execute the request and get the response
$response = curl_exec($ch);
// Close the cURL handle
curl_close($ch);
// Decode the data
$data = json_decode($response, true);

Your $data variable will then be an array containing a token key - something like the below. This token is what you'll need to access any of the other endpoints:

{
  "token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.sdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdf.50z97ZEGJBckZN3vwBJ2u6UPX5Vsfieq4yFpUSDWELY",
  "uuid": "...",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

With this token in hand, you can then request data

Listening History

To get a list of podcasts you've listened to, you can use the following endpoint:

https://api.pocketcasts.com/user/history

Tip: As a hint of what endpoints are available, scan the README of the pocketcasts repo and compare to the list of resources.

With your $data['token'] in hand, you can request your listening history:

$authorization = "Authorization: Bearer " . $data['token']; // Prepare the authorisation token
// Initialize cURL
$ch = curl_init('https://api.pocketcasts.com/user/history');
// Set the request method to POST
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
// Inject the token into the header
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json', $authorization));
// Set the response format to plain text
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Execute the request and get the response
$response = curl_exec($ch);
// Close the cURL handle
curl_close($ch);
// Decode the data
$data = json_decode($response, true);

A lot of the code is similar to that of above, so consider putting it in a function.

You can now access a lot of data on Pocket Casts using the examples above.

I'm not going to be using this as the history doesn't tell you when you actually listened to it, nor does it give more than 100 results on desktop - which is annoying.