128.io Unofficial Feeds for Stitcher Premium

This project provided RSS feeds for each show or mini-series found on the Stitcher Premium subscription service. It was created to allow consuming shows from Stitcher Premium on other podcast apps than Stitcher's own app.

Features

• Listed known shows with premium content
• Supported searching Stitcher's catalog
• Provided RSS feeds for each Stitcher Premium show
• Provided episode download links that worked even if episode audio url had changed.
• Prometheus-compatible endpoint for application metrics

Software Stack

• PHP 7.4 (strict typing)
• Laravel Lumen microframework (launched at 5.3, 7.x at shutdown)
• Redis
• MariaDB

Miscellaneous

• Used Middleware written for authentication, blocking misbehaving podcast apps
• Integrated with Stitcher for authenticating users, checking subscription status, and searching their catalog of shows
• Relied on Basic authentication to securely authenticate users when accessing RSS feeds.
• Tokenized URLs used for enclosure URLs to verify membership at time of audio download.
• Went through multiple iterations before landing on an efficient caching solution for interaction with Stitcher's API.
• Handled over 4000 users and 1.2 million requests per day on a single $15 VPS at the time of its shutdown in 2020.

Source Code

The source code is available under the MIT License.