youtube-dl has some really great and powerful auto config options to automate downloading YouTube videos. However, there is not apparent support to configure youtube-dl on a per-playlist basis, so this project aims to fill that gap.

This project was partially inspired by the nice guide by Erik Ellsinger on auto-downloading videos on TrueNAS

  -config string
        The path to your config file (default "~/.config/ytdlmc/config")
  -downloader string
        The downloader to use. Technically only build to work for 'youtube-dl', but forks like 'yt-dlp' work for most things (default "youtube-dl")
  -simulate
        Print command and don't execute

NOTE: Go is very pedantic about it's JSON, and will not except trailing commas or comments!

Configuration is done within named "config groups". All parameters are entered as they would be in the command line, and you can view youtube-dl documentation for info on each of them. The only option straying from this is batch-file:

-a, --batch-file FILE                File containing URLs to download ('-'
                                     for stdin), one URL per line. Lines
                                     starting with '#', ';' or ']' are
                                     considered as comments and ignored.

Which will instead take an array of strings.

In addition to the youtube-dl options, some extra elements are available for the json config:

• disable - Skips the group, allowing you to effectively comment it out.
• comment - Field is ignored, but allows you to add a comment describing the config group.
• subgroups - Another set of name-group pairs which inherit all the values of the parent group. If parent is disabled, subgroups are skipped.

See example.json to view a sample config.

A docker build is available on dockerhub. In short, it just downloads the latest of yt-dlp and sets up a Cron task for performing downloads

• /opt/appdata - Not used directly by the container, but where you should map things like cookies/cache/archive data.
• /opt/log - Where the log file will be written
• /opt/downloads - Not used directly, but where you should map any of your file downloads

• CRONTTIME - The cron task setup (Defaults to */30 * * * *)

⬜️ Add support for yt-dlp and change default downloader

✅ Allow sub-config groups to inherit settings

⬜️ Add functionality to remove existing videos older than N days