Overview

License: MIT | Author: Mark Veltzer | Python: >= 3.12 | Status: Beta

What is pytubekit?

Pytubekit is a command-line tool for performing bulk operations on your YouTube account. It uses the YouTube Data API v3 to manage playlists, clean up unavailable videos, deduplicate entries, dump playlist contents, and more.

Key Features

  • List all playlists in your YouTube account

  • List all items within a specific playlist

  • Dump all playlists to files on disk

  • Clean up playlists: remove duplicates, deleted videos, and private videos

  • Remove unavailable/private videos from all playlists at once

  • Subtract one set of playlists from another (set difference)

  • Copy, merge, and sort playlists

  • Search for videos across playlists by title or channel

  • Export playlists to CSV

  • Rename playlists

  • Diff playlists against local files to find unseen videos

  • Enrich video IDs with full metadata via add_data

  • Add videos from a file to a playlist

  • Handle playlist overflow (5,000-item YouTube limit)

  • Get detailed information about a specific video

  • Collect YouTube video IDs from text files

  • List channels and their playlists

  • Download Watch Later playlist via yt-dlp

Installation

From PyPI:

pip install pytubekit

From source:

git clone https://github.com/veltzer/pytubekit.git
cd pytubekit
pip install -e .

Quick Start

After installation, the pytubekit command becomes available:

# List all your playlists
pytubekit playlists

# List items in a specific playlist
pytubekit playlist --name "My Playlist"

# Clean up a playlist (remove duplicates, deleted, and private videos)
pytubekit cleanup --cleanup-names "My Playlist" --do-delete

# Export a playlist to CSV
pytubekit export_csv --export-playlist-name "My Playlist" --export-csv-path out.csv

# Search across playlists
pytubekit search_playlist --search-playlists "Music" "Talks" --search-query "python"

# Get info about a video
pytubekit video_info --id xL_sMXfzzyA

Authentication

Pytubekit uses OAuth2 to authenticate with the YouTube API. On first run, it will open a browser window for you to authorize access to your YouTube account. The credentials are managed by the pygooglehelper library. A client_secret.json ships inside the package, so no setup is needed; to use your own OAuth client instead, put it at ~/.config/pytubekit/client_secret.json and it takes precedence.

The following YouTube API scopes are requested:

  • youtube - full access

  • youtube.force-ssl - SSL-enforced access

  • youtube.readonly - read-only access

API Quota

The YouTube Data API v3 has a quota of 10,000 units per day. If you hit the limit, wait until the next day for the quota to reset.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started