ytyt-legacy

YouTube on Your Terms

Web App to allow for YouTube subscription management without a Google account.

Discontinued

Note that this is titled "legacy" for a reason. It is generally very old, and very ugly. I wrote it when I barely know any PHP or any Perl. It served me well for several years, but I'm not proud of it and it is not easy to maintain due to it having no real documentation and no real structure (the WebUI is a single PHP file).

I'm slowly working on implementation a new version written entirely in pure, modern Perl. That repository is currently private, but will be made public when it reaches approximate parity with this one and I will update this document to recommend it.

Synopsis

This is a web application which is capable of managing YouTube subscriptions without needing a Google account. On top of that, it provides a few other nice features:

• Several 'player' options: Links directly to the website, link to the Embedded player, link to a 'no-cookie' version of the embedded player, link to a proxied version of the embedded player (DuckDuckGo), and copying of the web URL to your clipboard.
• Custom theme support.
• Ability to sort channels into categories.
• Ability to search within all subscriptions.
• Access controls based on connecting IP address.

Installation

This provides a PHP a web application, but not it's own server. This means you need to provide a PHP web server such as Nginx with a PHP-FPM module, or Apache2.

The first steps, regardless of your server application should be the same. Clone this repository:

git clone https://git.john.me.tz/jpm/ytyt-legacy.git

Change the ownership of that directory to belong to your web server user. The defaults for Debian are included throughout:

chown -R www-data:www-data ytyt-legacy

Now, you can configure your web server to point at the www/ subdirectory and to open index.php by default.

Nginx

These instructions assume that you already have a working version of FPM.

To run this application at a sub-directory of an existing domain, add something similar to the following to that server block:

    location ^~ /youtube {
        alias /var/lib/ytyt-legacy/www;
        index index.php;
        location ~ \.php$ {
            include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename/index.php;
        }
        access_log /var/log/nginx/youtube_access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/youtube_error.log;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

Change the following:

• /var/lib/ytyt-legacy - the location where you cloned the
• unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock - the location of the FPM socket (if not already configured elsewhere), noting that your version number might differ.
• /var/log/nginx/ytyt_access.log and /var/log/nginx/ytyt_error.log - the appropriate location for log files.

If you would like to have the application as it's own domain or subdomain, you would make a new server block with similar information:

server {
    listen 80 http2;
    server_name ytyt.example.com;
    root /var/lib/ytyt-legacy/www;
    index index.php;
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename/index.php;
    }
    access_log /var/log/nginx/youtube_access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/youtube_error.log;
    include fastcgi_params;
}

In addition to the above, you'd also need to change:

• listen 80 - the desired port(s). You will need to add ssl_certificate, ssl_certificate_key, ssl_protocols and ssl_ciphers if you would like to have HTTPS support.
• ytyt.example.com - your (sub)domain.

You may wish to lock the application behind authentication using auth_basic or some other mechanism.

Restart nginx once changes have been made.

Apache2

I have previously tested this in the past, but don't currently have a reference configuration. Please see the Apache2 documentation.

Getting Started

Once you first navigate to the web interface, you will first be invited to initialize a database. After doing that, you can start to add subscriptions by opening the + menu, pasting the channel's URL, and submitting. The feed will be fetched immediately, but it will take up to a couple of minutes to finish, so you will not see results immediately.

You may also wish to open the gear (settings) menu and immediately update the IP access controls to prevent others from being able to read (view) or at least write to (modify) your subscriptions and settings.

Once new subscription is added, you can use the # icon next to the channel avatar to add it to various categories for filtering purposes, or use /*/ to restrict which videos are displayed for that channel based on the title.

If you would like to view only one channel at a time, you can either click the channel avatar to be taken to their feed on the YouTube website, or click ✓ next to their avatar to have only their videos displayed within the app.

You can us the X next to the avatar to remove the subscription.

If you have seen a video and would like to dismiss it from your feed, you can use the X for that item. This marks it as "seen" and it will no longer appear in the results. You can temporarily display these videos again by clicking the garbage can icon, then "Show Seen Videos". With that enabled, you have the option to mark it as "unseen" again.

Use the magnifying glass icon to search for videos across all channels by title.

Use the rotating arrows icon to force all channels to refresh immediately. Again, this will take up to a minute or two, if you have many subscriptions, to complete, so you will need to refresh the page.

Bugs/Shortcomings

As mentioned, the application is poorly written and difficult to maintain.

The biggest issue is that all actions and options are handled using URL arguments. There is currently no mechanism to append any currently enabled arguments to the end of subsequent requests. This means that settings are lost each time the page refreshes. ie. If you are viewing a category, then mark a video as played, you will be returned to the full list again and will need to re-select the category.

The next biggest issue is that there is no support for multiple accesses to the SQLite3 database at the same time, so if a refresh is currently running, it is likely that the page will fail to load.

Also, all settings are generally global, regardless of the client. This is because no cookies are used. Namely, if you change the theme, it changes for everyone. The only exception is that the user agent is checked to provide a different layout for mobile users.

There is no form of notification system for new videos.