youtube-node

A simple website for hosting your archived YouTube videos. This project is a rewrite of pocket-youtube in Node.js.

Prerequisites

You will need the following software (ignore if you are using Docker):

• Node.js
• PostgreSQL

Installation

1. Install the required Node.js packages and build the application.

   npm install
   npm run build

2. Create a file .env containing your PostgreSQL database credentials.

   DB_HOST="localhost"
   DB_USERNAME="username"
   DB_PASSWORD="password"
   DB_DATABASE="youtube"

3. Create a symbolic link to your video library.

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

4. Run the database initialization script. See Video Indexing for details.

   npm run init_db

5. Finally, start the application.

   npm start

Video Indexing

Data Requirements

youtube-dl and its derivatives have several options, two of which are important for archiving YouTube videos:

• --write-info-json
• --write-thumbnail

To use this application, you must have the .info.json metadata files. Technically, everything else is optional. You do not need to have thumbnails or even the videos for this application to work correctly.

Your videos/ directory may be structured however you wish, with one restriction. For each .info.json file, the corresponding video and thumbnail files must have the same directory name and file name (not including extension).

Using init_db

The database initialization script init_db reads line-by-line from standard input. Each line shall be a path to a .info.json file. You can manually type in each path, or use something like find to output the paths automatically. Here is an example which will index every video in the videos directory.

find videos/ -type f -name "*.info.json" | npm run init_db

As of right now, there is no separate functionality to add or remove videos. Each invocation of init_db will completely replace the database contents. Therefore, it may be helpful to use a text file to gather all of your paths beforehand. Here is another example which indexes specific subdirectories.

for x in foo bar baz; do
    find videos/$x/ -type f -name "*.info.json"
done | npm run init_db

Docker

docker compose up

Like before, the database must be initialized manually.

docker compose exec -T app npm run init_db