Strava: update gear using strava api

Introduction

I started to use Pro bike garage to track the parts of my bike. But the app can only match activities for which the gear is set. I started to using the gear feature in Strava when using a second bike for activities. So before that (December 2018 in my case) all activities have no gear set.

This blog post describes how I updated all past activities and set the gear_id for them.

The Python code here is using Python 3.6+ and requests.

You need your own Strava api application. For more information on your own app look at http://developers.strava.com/ and for your CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET go to your api page at https://www.strava.com/settings/api.

Get an access_token

The Getting started from Strava is pretty helpful here: http://developers.strava.com/docs/getting-started/.

The scope is set to read and write activities. Private activities are not included (this would need activity:read_all).

The same steps as in the guide but using Python:

import requests

params = {
    "client_id": <CLIENT_ID>,
    "response_type": "code",
    "redirect_uri": "http://localhost",
    "approval_prompt": "force",
    "scope": 'read,activity:read,activity:write',
}

response = requests.get("http://www.strava.com/oauth/authorize", params=params, allow_redirects=False)
print(response.text)

Now copy the url into your browser and authorize. The redirect goes to a localhost server that doesn't work but the code in the url is all we need.

The next step is to get the access_token by using the code given by the url:

data = {
   "client_id": <CLIENT_ID>,
   "client_secret": "<CLIENT_SECRET>",
   "code": "<CODE>",
   "grant_type": "authorization_code",
}

response = requests.post(url="https://www.strava.com/oauth/token",
                         data=data)
access_token = response.json()["access_token"]

All following api calls will use this access_token. The token has an expiration date which seems to be currently a day. Enough to update all activities we want to update.

Update the gear of selected activities

All api calls with use the access_token in their header, so set a header:

headers = {
   "Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}"
}

To get an ACTIVITY_ID browse your strava activities. First we need one with the gear already set and then one without a gear set.

Now get one activity with the gear already set to get the gear_id.

activity = requests.get(url="https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/<ACTIVITY_ID>",
                        headers=headers)

gear_id = activity.json().get("gear_id")

To test that everything works with one activity let us update the gear for another activity that has no gear set.

activity = requests.get(url="https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/<ACTIVITY_ID>",
                        headers=headers)

# should return None
print(activity.json().get("gear_id"))

# update only the gear of that activity
response = requests.put(url=f"https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/{activity.json()['id']}",
                        data={"gear_id": gear_id},
                        headers=headers)

# should return the expected gear_id
print(response.json().get("gear_id"))

Update the gear of all old activities without gear set

We loop over all activities of the user and update the bicyle rides that have no gear. I have about 2200 rides and some other activities. So I set the loop range to 24 pages of data.

for page in range(1, 25):
    print(f"-- page: {page}")
    params = {"per_page": 100, "page": page}
    result = requests.get(url="https://www.strava.com/api/v3/athlete/activities",
                          params=params, headers=headers)
    for item in result.json():
        if item.get("type") == "Ride" and item.get("gear_id") is None:
            print(f"update {item.get('id')}")
            activity = requests.put(url=f"https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/{item.get('id')}",
                                    data={"gear_id": gear_id},
                                    headers=headers)
            print(activity.json().get("gear_id"))

The script ran quite some time but was still to fast for the rate limit (which is 600 requests per 15 minutes). When the rate limit was hit I waited for 15 minutes and started the for loop again.

The waiting time for the updates to finish was long enough to write this post.