tubesync

TubeSync

TubeSync is a PVR (personal video recorder) for YouTube. Or, like Sonarr but for YouTube (with a built-in download client). It is designed to synchronize channels and playlists from YouTube to local directories and update your media server once media is downloaded.

If you want to watch YouTube videos in particular quality or settings from your local media server, then TubeSync is for you. Internally, TubeSync is a web interface wrapper on yt-dlp and ffmpeg with a task scheduler.

There are several other web interfaces to YouTube and yt-dlp all with varying features and implementations. TubeSync's largest difference is full PVR experience of updating media servers and better selection of media formats. Additionally, to be as hands-free as possible, TubeSync has gradual retrying of failures with back-off timers so media which fails to download will be retried for an extended period making it, hopefully, quite reliable.

Latest container image

ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:latest

Screenshots

Dashboard

Sources overview

Source details

Media overview

Media details

Requirements

For the easiest installation, you will need an environment to run containers such as Docker or Podman. You will also need as much space as you want to allocate to downloaded media and thumbnails. If you download a lot of media at high resolutions this can be very large.

What to expect

Once running, TubeSync will download media to a specified directory. Inside this directory will be a video and audio subdirectories. All media which only has an audio stream (such as music) will download to the audio directory. All media with a video stream will be downloaded to the video directory. All administration of TubeSync is performed via a web interface. You can optionally add a media server, currently only Jellyfin or Plex, to complete the PVR experience.

Installation

TubeSync is designed to be run in a container, such as via Docker or Podman. It also works in a Docker Compose stack. amd64 (most desktop PCs and servers) and arm64 (modern ARM computers, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 or later) are supported.

Example (with Docker on *nix):

First find the user ID and group ID you want to run TubeSync as, if you're not sure what this is it's probably your current user ID and group ID:

$ id
# Example output, in this example, user ID = 1000, group ID = 1000
# id uid=1000(username) gid=1000(username) groups=1000(username),129(docker)

You can find your local timezone name here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

If unset, TZ defaults to UTC.

Next, create the directories you're going to use for config data and downloads:

$ mkdir /some/directory/tubesync-config
$ mkdir /some/directory/tubesync-downloads

Finally, download and run the container:

# Pull image
$ docker pull ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:latest
# Start the container using your user ID and group ID
$ docker run \
  -d \
  --name tubesync \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Europe/London \
  -v /some/directory/tubesync-config:/config \
  -v /some/directory/tubesync-downloads:/downloads \
  -p 4848:4848 \
  --stop-timeout 1800 \
  ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:latest

Once running, open http://localhost:4848 in your browser and you should see the TubeSync dashboard. If you do, you can proceed to adding some sources (YouTube channels and playlists). If not, check docker logs tubesync to see what errors might be occurring, typical ones are file permission issues.

Alternatively, for Docker Compose, you can use something like:

services:
  tubesync:
    image: ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:latest
    container_name: tubesync
    restart: unless-stopped
    stop_grace_period: 30m
    ports:
      - 4848:4848
    volumes:
      - /some/directory/tubesync-config:/config
      - /some/directory/tubesync-downloads:/downloads
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000

[!IMPORTANT]
If the /downloads directory is mounted from a Samba volume, be sure to also supply the uid and gid mount parameters in the driver options. These must be matched to the PUID and PGID values, which were specified as environment variables.

Matching these user and group ID numbers prevents issues when executing file actions, such as writing metadata. See this issue for details.

Optional authentication

You can enable basic HTTP authentication by setting the HTTP_USER and HTTP_PASS environment variables. See the environment variables reference for details.

Updating

To update, you can just pull a new version of the container image as they are released.

$ docker pull ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:v[number]

Back-end updates such as database migrations should be automatic.

[!IMPORTANT] MariaDB was not automatically upgraded for UUID column types. To see what changes are needed, you can run:

docker exec -it tubesync python3 /app/manage.py fix-mariadb --dry-run --uuid-columns

Removing the --dry-run will attempt to execute those statements using the configured database connection.

Moving, backing up, etc.

TubeSync, when running in its default container, stores thumbnails, cache and its SQLite database into the /config directory and wherever you've mapped that to on your file system. Just copying or moving this directory and making sure the permissions are correct is sufficient to move, back up or migrate your TubeSync install.

Using TubeSync

1. Add some sources

Pick your favourite YouTube channels or playlists, pop over to the "sources" tab, click whichever add button suits you, enter the URL and validate it. This process extracts the key information from the URL and makes sure it's a valid URL. This is the channel name for YouTube channels and the playlist ID for YouTube playlists.

You will then be presented with the initial add a source form where you can select all the features you want, such as how often you want to index your source and the quality of the media you want to download. Once happy, click "add source".

2. Wait

That's about it. All other actions are automatic and performed on timers by scheduled tasks. You can see what your TubeSync instance is doing on the "tasks" tab.

As media is indexed and downloaded it will appear in the "media" tab.

3. Media Server updating

Currently TubeSync supports Plex and Jellyfin as media servers. You can add your local Jellyfin or Plex server under the "media servers" tab.

Logging and debugging

Moved to the wiki.

Advanced usage guides

Moved to the wiki.

Warnings

1. Index frequency

It's a good idea to add sources with as long of an index frequency as possible. This is the duration between indexes of the source. An index is when TubeSync checks to see what videos available on a channel or playlist to find new media. Try and keep this as long as possible, up to 24 hours.

2. Indexing massive channels

If you add a massive channel (one with several thousand videos) to TubeSync and choose "index every hour" or a similarly short interval; it's entirely possible that your TubeSync install may spend its entire time indexing the channel, over and over again, without downloading any media. Check your tasks for the status of your TubeSync install.

Be nice. It's entirely possible that your IP address could get throttled and/or banned, by the source, if you try to crawl extremely large amounts quickly. Try to be polite with the smallest amount of indexing and concurrent downloads possible for your needs.

FAQ

Moved to the wiki.

Advanced configuration

There are a number of other environment variables you can set. These are, mostly, NOT required to be set in the default container installation, they are really only useful if you are manually installing TubeSync in some other environment. These are:

Name	What	Example
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY	Django's SECRET_KEY	YJySXnQLB7UVZw2dXKDWxI5lEZaImK6l
DJANGO_URL_PREFIX	Run TubeSync in a sub-URL on the web server	/somepath/
TUBESYNC_DEBUG	Enable debugging	True
TUBESYNC_HOSTS	Django's ALLOWED_HOSTS, defaults to *	tubesync.example.com,otherhost.com
TUBESYNC_RESET_DOWNLOAD_DIR	Toggle resetting /downloads permissions, defaults to True	True
TUBESYNC_VIDEO_HEIGHT_CUTOFF	Smallest video height in pixels permitted to download	240
TUBESYNC_RENAME_SOURCES	Rename media files from selected sources	Source1_directory,Source2_directory
TUBESYNC_RENAME_ALL_SOURCES	Rename media files from all sources	True
TUBESYNC_DIRECTORY_PREFIX	Enable video and audio directory prefixes in /downloads	True
TUBESYNC_SHRINK_NEW	Filter unneeded information from newly retrieved metadata	True
TUBESYNC_SHRINK_OLD	Filter unneeded information from metadata loaded from the database	True
TUBESYNC_SAVE_MEDIA_AFTER_BULK_ACTION	Queue a save_media task per item changed by an admin bulk action	True
GUNICORN_WORKERS	Number of gunicorn (web request) workers to spawn	3
LISTEN_HOST	IP address for gunicorn to listen on	127.0.0.1
LISTEN_PORT	Port number for gunicorn to listen on	8080
HTTP_USER	Sets the username for HTTP basic authentication	some-username
HTTP_PASS	Sets the password for HTTP basic authentication	some-secure-password
DATABASE_CONNECTION	Optional external database connection details	postgresql://user:pass@host:port/database

Manual, non-containerised, installation

As a relatively normal Django app you can run TubeSync without the container. Beyond following this rough guide, you are on your own and should be knowledgeable about installing and running WSGI-based Python web applications before attempting this.

1. Clone or download this repo
2. Make sure you're running a modern version of Python (>=3.12) and have Pipenv installed
3. Set up the environment with pipenv install
4. Copy tubesync/tubesync/local_settings.py.example to tubesync/tubesync/local_settings.py and edit it as appropriate
5. Run migrations with ./manage.py migrate
6. Collect static files with ./manage.py collectstatic
7. Set up your preferred WSGI server, such as gunicorn pointing it to the application in tubesync/tubesync/wsgi.py
8. Set up your proxy server such as nginx and forward it to the WSGI server
9. Check the web interface is working
10. Run ./manage.py process_tasks as the background task worker to index and download media. This is a non-detaching process that will write logs to the console. For long term running you could use a terminal multiplexer such as tmux, or create systemd unit to run it.

Tests

There is a moderately comprehensive test suite focusing on the custom media format matching logic and that the front-end interface works. You can run it via Django:

$ ./manage.py test --verbosity=2

Contributing

All properly formatted and sensible pull requests, issues and comments are welcome.