Your self hosted YouTube media server

Table of contents:

• Docs with FAQ, API endpoints
• Core functionality
• Resources
• Installing
• Getting Started
• Known limitations
• Port Collisions
• Common Errors
• Roadmap
• Donate

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Core functionality

Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface. THis includes:

• Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels
• Download Videos using yt-dlp
• Index and make videos searchable
• Play videos
• Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos

Resources

• Discord: Connect with us on our Discord server.
• r/TubeArchivist: Join our Subreddit.
• Browser Extension Tube Archivist Companion, for Firefox and Chrome
• Tube Archivist Metrics to create statistics in Prometheus/OpenMetrics format.
• Showcase To see more screenshots and Youtube videos showing off TubeArchvist.

Installing

For minimal system requirements, the Tube Archivist stack needs around 2GB of available memory for a small testing setup and around 4GB of available memory for a mid to large sized installation. Minimal with dual core with 4 threads, better quad core plus. This project requires docker. Ensure it is installed and running on your system.

The documentation has additional user provided instructions for Unraid, Synology, Podman and True NAS.

The instructions here should get you up and running quickly, for Docker beginners and full explanation about each environment variable, see the docs.

Take a look at the example docker-compose.yml and configure the required environment variables.

TubeArchivist:

Environment Var	Value
TA_HOST	Server IP or hostname, without port, without protocol	Required
TA_USERNAME	Initial username when logging into TA	Required
TA_PASSWORD	Initial password when logging into TA	Required
ELASTIC_PASSWORD	Password for ElasticSearch	Required
REDIS_HOST	Hostname for Redis	Required
TZ	Set your timezone for the scheduler	Required
TA_PORT	Overwrite Nginx port	Optional
TA_UWSGI_PORT	Overwrite container internal uwsgi port	Optional
ES_URL	URL That ElasticSearch runs on	Optional
HOST_GID	Allow TA to own the video files instead of container user	Optional
HOST_UID	Allow TA to own the video files instead of container user	Optional
ELASTIC_USER	Change the default ElasticSearch user	Optional
REDIS_PORT	Port that Redis runs on	Optional
TA_LDAP	Configure TA to use LDAP Authentication	Read more
ENABLE_CAST	Enable casting support	Read more
DJANGO_DEBUG	Return additional error messages, for debug only

ElasticSearch

Environment Var	Value	State
ELASTIC_PASSWORD	Matching password ELASTIC_PASSWORD from TubeArchivist	Required
http.port	Change the port ElasticSearch runs on	Optional

Update

Always use the latest (the default) or a named semantic version tag for the docker images. The unstable tags are only for your testing environment, there might not be an update path for these testing builds.

You will see the current version number of Tube Archivist in the footer of the interface. There is a daily version check task querying tubearchivist.com, notifying you of any new releases in the footer. To take advantage of the latest fixes and improvements, make sure you are running the latest and greatest. After updating, check the footer to verify you are running the expected version.

• This project is tested for updates between one or two releases maximum. Further updates back may or may not be supported and you might have to reset your index and configurations to update. Ideally apply new updates at least once per month.
• There can be breaking changes between updates, particularly as the application grows, new environment variables or settings might be required for you to set in the your docker-compose file. Always check the release notes: Any breaking changes will be marked there.
• All testing and development is done with the Elasticsearch version number as mentioned in the provided docker-compose.yml file. This will be updated when a new release of Elasticsearch is available. Running an older version of Elasticsearch is most likely not going to result in any issues, but it's still recommended to run the same version as mentioned. Use bbilly1/tubearchivist-es to automatically get the recommended version.

Getting Started

1. Go through the settings page and look at the available options. Particularly set Download Format to your desired video quality before downloading. Tube Archivist downloads the best available quality by default. To support iOS or MacOS and some other browsers a compatible format must be specified. For example:

bestvideo[vcodec*=avc1]+bestaudio[acodec*=mp4a]/mp4

2. Subscribe to some of your favorite YouTube channels on the channels page.
3. On the downloads page, click on Rescan subscriptions to add videos from the subscribed channels to your Download queue or click on Add to download queue to manually add Video IDs, links, channels or playlists.
4. Click on Start download and let Tube Archivist to it's thing.
5. Enjoy your archived collection!

Port Collisions

If you have a collision on port 8000, best solution is to use dockers HOST_PORT and CONTAINER_PORT distinction: To for example change the interface to port 9000 use 9000:8000 in your docker-compose file.

For more information on port collisions, check the docs.

Common Errors

Here is a list of common errors and their solutions.

vm.max_map_count

Elastic Search in Docker requires the kernel setting of the host machine vm.max_map_count to be set to at least 262144.

To temporary set the value run:

sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144

To apply the change permanently depends on your host operating system:

• For example on Ubuntu Server add vm.max_map_count = 262144 to the file /etc/sysctl.conf.
• On Arch based systems create a file /etc/sysctl.d/max_map_count.conf with the content vm.max_map_count = 262144.
• On any other platform look up in the documentation on how to pass kernel parameters.

Permissions for elasticsearch

If you see a message similar to Unable to access 'path.repo' (/usr/share/elasticsearch/data/snapshot) or failed to obtain node locks, tried [/usr/share/elasticsearch/data] and maybe these locations are not writable when initially starting elasticsearch, that probably means the container is not allowed to write files to the volume.
To fix that issue, shutdown the container and on your host machine run:

chown 1000:0 -R /path/to/mount/point

This will match the permissions with the UID and GID of elasticsearch process within the container and should fix the issue.

Disk usage

The Elasticsearch index will turn to read only if the disk usage of the container goes above 95% until the usage drops below 90% again, you will see error messages like disk usage exceeded flood-stage watermark.

Similar to that, TubeArchivist will become all sorts of messed up when running out of disk space. There are some error messages in the logs when that happens, but it's best to make sure to have enough disk space before starting to download.

Known limitations

• Video files created by Tube Archivist need to be playable in your browser of choice. Not every codec is compatible with every browser and might require some testing with format selection.
• Every limitation of yt-dlp will also be present in Tube Archivist. If yt-dlp can't download or extract a video for any reason, Tube Archivist won't be able to either.
• There is currently no flexibility in naming of the media files.

Roadmap

We have come far, nonetheless we are not short of ideas on how to improve and extend this project. Issues waiting for you to be tackled in no particular order:

• User roles
• Podcast mode to serve channel as mp3
• Implement PyFilesystem for flexible video storage
• Implement Apprise for notifications (#97)
• User created playlists, random and repeat controls (#108, #220)
• Auto play or play next link (#226)
• Multi language support
• Show total video downloaded vs total videos available in channel
• Add statistics of index
• Download speed schedule (#198)
• Download or Ignore videos by keyword (#163)
• Custom searchable notes to videos, channels, playlists (#144)

Implemented:

• Download video comments [2022-11-30]
• Show similar videos on video page [2022-11-30]
• Implement complete offline media file import from json file [2022-08-20]
• Filter and query in search form, search by url query [2022-07-23]
• Make items in grid row configurable to use more of the screen [2022-06-04]
• Add passing browser cookies to yt-dlp [2022-05-08]
• Add SponsorBlock integration [2022-04-16]
• Implement per channel settings [2022-03-26]
• Subtitle download & indexing [2022-02-13]
• Fancy advanced unified search interface [2022-01-08]
• Auto rescan and auto download on a schedule [2021-12-17]
• Optional automatic deletion of watched items after a specified time [2021-12-17]
• Create playlists [2021-11-27]
• Access control [2021-11-01]
• Delete videos and channel [2021-10-16]
• Add thumbnail embed option [2021-10-16]
• Create a github wiki for user documentation [2021-10-03]
• Grid and list view for both channel and video list pages [2021-10-03]
• Un-ignore videos [2021-10-03]
• Dynamic download queue [2021-09-26]
• Backup and restore [2021-09-22]
• Scan your file system to index already downloaded videos [2021-09-14]

Donate

The best donation to Tube Archivist is your time, take a look at the contribution page to get started.
Second best way to support the development is to provide for caffeinated beverages:

• GitHub Sponsor become a sponsor here on GitHub
• Paypal.me for a one time coffee
• Paypal Subscription for a monthly coffee
• ko-fi.com for an alternative platform

Notable mentions

This is a selection of places where this project has been featured on reddit, in the news, blogs or any other online media, newest on top.

• noted.lol: Dev Debrief, An Interview With the Developer of Tube Archivist, [2023-03-30] [link]
• console.substack.com: Interview With Simon of Tube Archivist, [2023-01-29] [link]
• reddit.com: Tube Archivist v0.3.0 - Now Archiving Comments, [2022-12-02] [link]
• reddit.com: Tube Archivist v0.2 - Now with Full Text Search, [2022-07-24] [link]
• noted.lol: How I Control What Media My Kids Watch Using Tube Archivist, [2022-03-27] [link]
• thehomelab.wiki: Tube Archivist - A Youtube-DL Alternative on Steroids, [2022-01-27] [link]
• reddit.com: Celebrating TubeArchivist v0.1, [2022-01-09] [link]
• linuxunplugged.com: Pick: tubearchivist — Your self-hosted YouTube media server, [2021-09-11] [link] and [2021-10-05] [link]
• reddit.com: Introducing Tube Archivist, your self hosted Youtube media server, [2021-09-12] [link]

Sponsor

Big thank you to Digitalocean for generously donating credit for the tubearchivist.com VPS and buildserver.