@qodestack/dl-yt-playlist

Download YouTube Playlist

Download all YouTube videos (or audio only) from every video in a playlist!

Prerequisites

You'll need a few things to use this project:

• This project uses Bun! Get that installed or feel free to edit the source code to use Node instead (it'll only be a few adjustments).
• You'll need a YouTube Data API key. Set that to the API_KEY env variable.
• The yt-dlp command line tool needs to be present on your system. You can easily install it with a tool like Brew.

Usage

Say you have this code in a file named download.ts:

import {downloadYoutubePlaylist} from 'dl-yt-playlist'

const {playlistId, apiKey} = process.env

const resultsMetadata = await downloadYoutubePlaylist({
  // Required:
  playlistId: <string>, // The YouTube playlist id
  apiKey: <string>, // Your YouTube Data api key
  directory: <string>, // The full path where you want to save everything

  // Optional:
  audioOnly: <boolean>, // `true` for audio MP3, `false` for video MP4 (default `false`)
  getFullData: <boolean>, // `false` will only get the 1st 50 videos (default `false`)
  maxLengthInSeconds: <number>, // Videos longer than this will be skipped (default `Infinity`)
  downloadData: <boolean>, // `true` downloads the YouTube videos (default `true`)
  downloadThumbnails: <boolean>, // `true` downloads jpg thumbnail files (default `true`)
})

Now you can use Bun to run the file:

bun run download.ts

Folder Structure

Downloads will be organized into the following folder structure:

data
  /<playlist name>
    /video
      <title> [<video id>].mp4
    /audio
      <title> [<video id>].mp3
    /thumbnails
      <video id>.jpg
    responses.json
    videoMetadata.json

/video	This folder will contain all the mp4 video files
/audio	This folder will contain all the mp3 audio files
/thumbnails	This folder will contain all the jpg thumbnail files
responses.json	This file will contain all the responses from the YouTube api. This is useful for understanding the shape of the data.
videoMetadata.json	This file will contain an array metadata on each video. See shape below

Video Metadata Shape

Each video will have metadata stored in the videoMetadata.json with the following shape:

{
  id: string
  title: string
  channel: string
  publishedAt: string
  dateAddedToPlaylist: string
  url: string
  lengthInSeconds: number
}