github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist @v0.5.10 sqlite

more screenshots and video

Table of contents

• Docs with FAQ, and API documentation
• 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
• Jellyfin Plugin: Add your videos to Jellyfin
• Plex Plugin: Add your videos to Plex

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 and Podman.

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.

All environment variables are explained in detail in the docs here.

Both TA_PASSWORD and ELASTIC_PASSWORD can be suffixed with _FILE to allow passing in passwords as secretes. _FILE is a convention used by some images including ElasticSearch

TubeArchivist

Environment Var	Value	Required
TA_HOST	Server IP or hostname http://tubearchivist.local:8000	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_CON	Connection string to Redis	Required
TZ	Set your timezone for the scheduler	Required
TA_PORT	Overwrite Nginx port	Optional
TA_BACKEND_PORT	Overwrite container internal backend server port	Optional
TA_ENABLE_AUTH_PROXY	Enables support for forwarding auth in reverse proxies	Read more
TA_AUTH_PROXY_USERNAME_HEADER	Header containing username to log in	Optional
TA_AUTH_PROXY_LOGOUT_URL	Logout URL for forwarded auth	Optional
ES_URL	URL That ElasticSearch runs on	Optional
ES_DISABLE_VERIFY_SSL	Disable ElasticSearch SSL certificate verification	Optional
ES_SNAPSHOT_DIR	Custom path where elastic search stores snapshots for master/data nodes	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
TA_LDAP	Configure TA to use LDAP Authentication	Read more
DISABLE_STATIC_AUTH	Remove authentication from media files, (Google Cast...)	Read more
TA_AUTO_UPDATE_YTDLP	Configure TA to automatically install the latest yt-dlp on container start	Optional
DJANGO_DEBUG	Return additional error messages, for debug only	Optional
TA_LOGIN_AUTH_MODE	Configure the order of login authentication backends (Default: single)	Optional

TA_LOGIN_AUTH_MODE value	Description
single	Only use a single backend (default, or LDAP, or Forward auth, selected by TA_LDAP or TA_ENABLE_AUTH_PROXY)
local	Use local password database only
ldap	Use LDAP backend only
forwardauth	Use reverse proxy headers only
ldap_local	Use LDAP backend in addition to the local password database

ElasticSearch

Environment Var	Value	Required
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 see CONTRIBUTING.md#beta-testing.

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. 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. 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 from time to time. 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.

error setting rlimit

If you are seeing errors like failed to create shim: OCI runtime create failed and error during container init: error setting rlimits, this means docker can't set these limits, usually because they are set at another place or are incompatible because of other reasons. Solution is to remove the ulimits key from the ES container in your docker compose and start again.

This can happen if you have nested virtualizations, e.g. LXC running Docker in Proxmox.

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 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:

• [ ] Audio download
• [ ] Podcast mode to serve channel as mp3
• [ ] 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
• [ ] Download or Ignore videos by keyword (#163)
• [ ] Custom searchable notes to videos, channels, playlists (#144)
• [ ] Search comments
• [ ] Per user videos/channel/playlists

Implemented: - [X] Search download queue [2025-07-31] - [X] Configure shorts, streams and video sizes per channel [2024-07-15] - [X] User created playlists [2024-04-10] - [X] User roles, aka read only user [2023-11-10] - [X] Add statistics of index [2023-09-03] - [X] Implement Apprise for notifications [2023-08-05] - [X] Download video comments [2022-11-30] - [X] Show similar videos on video