sprach666 / sprach666

pocket-youtube

Simple webpage for hosting video library via HTTP

Installation

You will need the following tools, commonly referred to as LAMP.

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP 😣

"Your father's LAMP-saber. This is the weapon of a web engineer. Not as clumsy or random as Node.js. An elegant stack for a more civilized age."

- Obi-Wan Kenobi

Apache Configuration

The first step is to host your video library on Apache, which can be configured to permit access to specific directories outside the document root. Add the following to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.

Alias "/videos" "/path/to/video/library"
<Directory /path/to/video/library>
    Options +Indexes
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Restart Apache for your changes to take effect. Your videos should then be visible at http://localhost/videos/.

service apache2 restart

A similar step follows for hosting the webpages in this repository at http://localhost/youtube/.

Alias "/youtube" "/path/to/this/repository"
<Directory /path/to/this/repository>
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Database Setup

This project requires videos/ to be in a specific format. All files must be named by their YouTube ID, which guarantees unique and simple filenames. Metadata and thumbnails for each video are also needed.

videos/
├── dQw4w9WgXcQ.info.json
├── dQw4w9WgXcQ.mp4
└── dQw4w9WgXcQ.webp

The following youtube-dl options are directly responsible for creating the output as described. See remarks on youtube-dl for more details.

--output '%(id)s.%(ext)s'
--write-info-json
--write-thumbnail

Now comes the task of storing the metadata for all videos in a database. First, create a MySQL database for the sole use of this project. You may use any name you like.

CREATE DATABASE pocket_youtube;

Next, create a symbolic link named videos to your video library. Please note that for security reasons, Apache disables following symbolic links by default, which means that http://localhost/youtube/videos/ should not be accessible.

ln --symbolic /path/to/video/library videos

Create a file named mysql.php which contains your MySQL login credentials and database name.

<?php
$hostname = "localhost";
$username = ...;
$password = ...;
$database = "pocket_youtube";

Finally, navigate to http://localhost/youtube/init_db.php to initialize the database. Upon returning to the homepage, you should find it populated with your videos.

You can now safely remove the symbolic link you created earlier, although there is nothing wrong with keeping it around for later use.

rm videos # optional

Remarks on youtube-dl

Work in progress.