youtubetoolkit

youtubetoolkit

usage overview

When launching the CLI with a command for the first time, it will print a URL that you must open in your browser (if it fails to automagically open a browser for you) to authorize the CLI to act on your behalf on your YouTube account. The flag --token allows you to specify the filename where the CLI will store the auth token.

Data output will be printed to STDOUT, while info and errors to STDERR. Commands like subscribe and playlist add can receive data from STDIN. This allows you to do your wizardry with OS pipes and i/o redirections.

For example, you can do something like this to copy subscriptions from one account to another:

$ youtubetoolkit -t account1 subscriptions list | youtubetoolkit -t account2 subscriptions add

Or you can add to a playlist the last 7 days video uploads from a list of channels:

$ youtubetoolkit lastuploads < channelIds.csv | youtubetoolkit playlists new test-playlist

Complete list of commands:

youtubetoolkit lastuploads --days <#>

youtubetoolkit subscriptions list
youtubetoolkit subscriptions add <channel id>
youtubetoolkit subscriptions del <channel id>

youtubetoolkit playlists
youtubetoolkit playlists new <playlist name>
youtubetoolkit playlists del <playlist id>

youtubetoolkit playlist --id <playlist_id>
youtubetoolkit playlist --id <playlist_id> add <video id>

Output formats available: --csv, --table, --jsonl.

Please use CLI flag --help to get additional help for every single command.

install

go install ./cmd/youtubetoolkit

requirement

To use the toolkit you need a OAuth2.0 client id and secret from Google Cloud:

• create a new project
• enable YouTube Data API v3
• configure the OAuth consent screen
  • for the sake of simplicity, set "External" type, don't publish the app (leave it in "testing"), and add your email to test users
• create a new OAuth Client ID credential and download the JSON file when prompted
  • the application type must be "Desktop app"
• rename the json file to client_secret.json (it's the default filename the CLI will search for)
  • needless to say, do NOT disclose this file

As you may know, YouTube API access is subject to quotas. A GCloud dev project should have a total of 10000 units per day, plenty for read-only operations (only 1 unit) but not for creating/inserting things. API operations like subscribing to a channel, creating a playlist, adding a video to a playlist all cost 50 units. Or 200 inserts per day before running into "quota exceeded" errors. The CLI will output the quota impact after every execution.

contributing

Pull requests are always welcome.