yt2pod is a daemon that monitors YouTube channels and publishes audio podcasts of them.

A podcast episode needn't be created for every video uploaded to a channel. They can be filtered based on title and upload date.

A single instance of yt2pod can monitor multiple YouTube channels simultaneously and publish a separate audio podcast based on each (and even multiple podcasts based on the same channel).

A built-in webserver serves the following for each podcast:

RSS Feed:
- http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/meta/SHORT_NAME.xml
Artwork:
- http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/meta/SHORT_NAME.jpg
Audio Episodes:
- http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/ep/id_of_source_youtube_video.EXT
- ...
- ...

The capitalised parts are specified in your config file.

Configuration

Configuration is specified in a JSON file. Here is an example config file.

Each podcast is configured as an element of the "podcasts" array. In each:

yt_channel is either the YouTube channel's Username or its ID (a 24-character string starting "UC"). Note that on modern YouTube, not every channel has a Username. Go to the channel's page using your web browser and look at the URL and you will find either one or the other.
epoch is a date ("YYYY-MM-DD" or an empty string to mean the beginning of time). Videos uploaded before the epoch are ignored.
title_filter is a regular expression. Videos with a title matching it have a podcast episode created for them. Use an empty string if you want them all.
name is the name of the podcast to be shown to the user in their podcast client.
description is the description of the podcast to be shown to the user in their podcast client. If this is omitted or is the empty string, a matter-of-fact description will be generated.
custom_image is a filesystem path (relative to the data directory - see the -data flag) for a custom image to use for the podcast's artwork. If this is omitted or is the empty string, the avatar image of the YouTube user this podcast is based on will be used.
short_name is a unique name that will be used for things like the podcast feed's file name and logging. For example, for podcast with a name of "This Week In Bikeshedding", use a short_name like "twib".

If you do not wish to expose the built-in webserver directly on the internet, you can set a link_proxy top-level key in the config file (e.g. "link_proxy": "https://downloads.obscure-podcasts.com",). This will cause the download links in the podcast feeds to be prefixed with that URI scheme & host, instead of http:// and the host yt2pod itself is listening on (which is configured with serve_host).

Command-line Flags

In addition to the config file, there are a handful of command-line flags:

usage:
  yt2pod [flags]

flags:
  -config string
      path to config file (default "config.json")
  -data string
      path to directory to change into and write data (created if needed) (default "data")
  -dataclean
      during initialisation, remove files in the data directory that are irrelevant given the current config
  -syslog
      send log statements to syslog rather than writing them to stderr
  -version
      show version information then exit

YouTube Data API

YouTube's Data API is used to query information. The example config file contains an API key that you can use, or you can get your own API key and use it instead.

Building and running using Docker

This project has a Dockerfile to facilitate containerized building and deployment.

Get the Dockerfile by cloning this repository and then use the following command to build the Docker image:

docker build . -t yt2pod

It can then be run using, for example, the following command:

docker run -v $PWD:/root -p 8888:8120 yt2pod

After you see from the output that it has successfully started, visit http://localhost:8888/ in your browser to see what's being served.

Building manually

With the Go toolchain installed, the following command will download the source code and build it:

go get github.com/frou/yt2pod

The yt2pod binary should now be built and located in $GOPATH/bin

🚨 The yt2pod binary calls out to the youtube-dl command at runtime. You should make sure you have youtube-dl installed (it is available in all good package managers).

Setting up as a Linux service

If you don't want to run using Docker, then you will probably want to set up yt2pod as a service in your Linux distribution of choice.

See hints regarding systemd and OpenRC.

sabberworm / yt2pod