---
title: List YouTube videos with the Data API and Ruby
slug: list-youtube-videos-with-the-data-api-and-ruby
published_at: 2021-02-17 18:00:25 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:29 +0000
summary: 
description: Fetching lists of videos from the YouTube Data API v3.  Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6  It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [rails, ruby, youtube API, YouTube Data API, Ruby on Rails, learn to code, Fetch a list of videos with the YouTube Data API, YouTube API, Fetching videos from the YouTube API with Ruby, ROR, Tutorial, API tutorial, cjav_dev]
views: 1328
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/list-youtube-videos-with-the-data-api-and-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfyqmN6ILE
youtube_id: hVfyqmN6ILE
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/hVfyqmN6ILE
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hVfyqmN6ILE/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# List YouTube videos with the Data API and Ruby

*Published: February 17, 2021*
*Views: 1328*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfyqmN6ILE)

[![List YouTube videos with the Data API and Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hVfyqmN6ILE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfyqmN6ILE)

## Description

Fetching lists of videos from the YouTube Data API v3.

Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev
Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6

It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

all right welcome back friends uh this this video we're gonna take the uh the credentials that we stored after finishing the oauth flow in the previous video and we're going to try to uh why don't we try to do the list endpoint first so we're going to try to list all the videos which are related to our channel and create video objects if they don't exist already for our for our application here so i think there's a couple different endpoints that we might want to use one of them is list for videos but the other is search so i'm trying to remember which uh which endpoint we want to use and i think this might be the one um let's see parameter can only be used in a properly authorized request is intended exclusively for content partners i don't know if that's us for mine okay so search for mine this seems this seems like a good starting point so let's see if we can use this to pull up some videos so we've got our app running there and let's see so we had some proofs of concept that we used um from the guides so in the guides section um we went to what do we do we went to web apps and then we went here so this is the youtube the youtube client that we're going to need so one question that you have when you're building an api integration with rails is where do you want to actually put the logic are we just going to drop it into the controller in a controller action are we going to make some class or set of classes that wrap up the interaction with the api probably a good choice are we just going to dump it directly into the active record model so there's a bunch of different choices we could put it into an active record or an active uh an active job so we could run it as like a background jobs there's a whole bunch of different ways that we could do this i think what i want to do is probably just create a plain old ruby object that that we can call out to that will figure out given a a youtube session which has credentials figure out how to make the api call to fetch all of the videos for that video session so i'm just going to create let's see so i'm going to create here in app models a new object now it turns out you can just put any plain old ruby objects or poros directly into this directory some people will create a services directory but it doesn't really matter you can just so here i'm just going to call this youtube.rb in the class youtube i i know that youtube i think has a capital t also but it just makes the um the file names and stuff a little bit neater uh so here uh let's see so i'm gonna i'm gonna use dependency injection to inject the um the youtube session and we'll be able to use the credentials off of the session to say like i don't know like uh fetch videos let's see what happens so here in the example on the documentation that google provides here for youtube for interacting with the youtube api they uh so they take the credentials and you create a new auth client so let's make this we want to probably memoize this again right so we'll say like at auth client or equals this thing and then instead of client options here we're going to use at session.credentials so that should give us an auth client that works and then from here what we can do is i guess we also need a youtube service uh let's see um deaf service at service or equals this thing okay so that'll give us our youtube service and then finally this is like their example for listing channels we don't actually want channels we want something else and then for mine we just say true and we're passing our okay so this is going to be service service dot um list okay so i bet there's a service method on youtube service for searching um so let's go double check that and just see if that is actually a thing um so you're watching kind of as i as i'm learning this too so uh let's see so youtube v3 generated probably not the generated one right i don't know let's take a look oh it is maybe okay so youtube v3 uh that's youtube service so let's let's see if they have a file called that youtube service again you can use this fuzzy finder just by typing t when you're on github and okay so do they have they don't have like a list of methods and like look at how massive this file is right like 3 000 lines so i'm just going to search for def search no search search terms let's see list searches that sounds okay so it's making a get request probably to v3 search and i think that might be the api endpoint that we want so i'm going to go back over to the reference here and go to search and is v3 searches the endpoint that aligns with this api yeah so v3 search so in the um in the ruby client library it's list underscore searches we give it a part a channel id stuff a bunch of other stuff for mine okay so it's for mine that's that's an inconsistency but that's all right for mine prettier is again like giving me some issues here so we want them the method is actually called list searches uh right is it yep okay and then it takes a part uh it takes uh for mine passing true i think that'll work i don't know if we need to pass the channel id we might but i think because we're authenticated like the credentials might have the channel id i don't know um and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff this is like um okay so in programming right there is a concept of coupling called connaissance this is a little bit of a tangent uh connections uh connections i'm sure i'm spelling it wrong of name programming yeah so connaissance is a software quality metric and so kinesis of name is like a coupling based on the name of a variable or a name of a thing kinesis of position canasence of algorithm so it's like different levels of coupling kind of uh and so one thing that's really bothering me about these methods is they have these super long lists of parameters i guess uh but whatever so we're just gonna look at the docs and try to stab our way through it so part is required and let's see set the parameter value to snippet okay sure snip it so snip it um and then i think options authorization is just something that we're going to want to pass for like every single one of these but let's let's see if we can get this to actually dance for us so we're going to go rails c and we'll say youtube.new youtube session.last and then we'll say y dot fetch videos and client secret is missing authorization failed client secret is missing um okay so um let's let's try to like do it manually then okay so we're gonna like start from where'd it go let's start from this whole this whole flow and see if our credentials are still valid uh so we're going to say youtube session.last.credentials which should be the credentials that we created yesterday right and then oh there is a missing client secret there huh i wonder if that is what it's complaining about all right and then we're gonna say what is the next step here we create a new youtube service and then we're gonna like fetch mine true part i think we'll just pass id okay so yeah all right so it does look like we do need to re-authenticate so we're coming back here to localhost 3000 slash youtube sessions and we'll go through the same flow again i think we're going to need to use that refresh token and set up a background task to refresh our auth key or auth tokens so that they stay fresh so if i run through this again let's let's see if we can get it to do what we want with the new credential so y dot fetch videos [Music] okay bad request contains an invalid argument okay so setting http get to google api's u2 v3 search for mine is true part equals snippet so let's see if they give us any more information here the part parameter specifies the comma separated list of one or more search resource properties search resource properties does this give you what those are so these are the filters but what is the part so let's say try it i don't know let's see what is this snippet can we do that uh execute with myself uh we got a 200 back okay so snippet does seem like that is the correct part um and then for mine true let's see execute oh contains an invalid argument all right so let's take that off let's take that part off youtube um just take that off entirely and we'll just say like give me all the wait how does this no that has to that has to be a thing for mine right for mine is true so why is it an invalid argument that doesn't make any sense right because oh all right let's let's leave read the docs a little bit better so for mine is properly authorized request so i wonder um if you set this to true then the types parameter value must also be set to video the types type where's the type type do you see type okay here type so do we need all right so for mine true type video let's see if that works hey look at that we are looking at a list of videos sweet very cool all right so this is epic i love it this is great so what do we want to do next now we want to like actually ingest this and then create video objects right so like how do we actually work with these videos so here's another cool thing that you can do from from irb or from pry underscore contains the most recent results so when we ran this when we called y dot fetch videos it made an api call and if we if we make that same call again it's going to make a second api call so rather than re-running the previous command which uh made an api call we can do is we can say videos is equal to underscore and that will like put the most recent return value into videos which is nice so that we can just work with videos directly now so we can say like videos.methods.sort minusclass.new.methods that'll show us just like what are the specific video things that we might care about so it looks like maybe items has the actual videos in it so we say videos uh videos dot items cool dot first that probably gives you like a okay so it gives you a search result object back we'll call it sr so it is sr.methods.cert.sort and the other thing that i'm thinking is that we prop we might just want to use the search well i don't know because it does have the description here it does have the channel title it has the channel id and it has even has like thumbnails and um some yeah so like let's see so sr what did we do so sr.methods.soar minusclast.new.methods let's see what's in here etag id kind snippet so sr dot snippet um is the search result snippet this is going to have like the the juicy stuff i think um like sr dot snippet dot um description yeah okay sr sr.snippet.title whoops oh nice did you mean that's cool uh nice cool so this is the previous video uh part four for the video manager i think i might change the names of the titles and such but um so sr dot let's do uh snippet is equal to sr dot snip oh let's just say sr.snippet.methods.sort minusclass methods channel id description published at title i think this is fine this is totally fine um ooh what does update bang do uh i bet it's just a method to update that in memory representation of the snippet probably not a big deal um okay let's store um so the other thing i was thinking the other day that we probably actually want to store like some versions of each description so that if we mess up we can roll back so i think what we want to do is create a snapshot of each video um each video description every time we every time we ingest it if it's different then we can um create like a snapshot so that no matter if we edit the description from youtube directly or if we edit the description from our application and we're updating it on youtube we can keep track of the the description updates so what i'm thinking is first we want to make this fetch to download the videos we want to iterate over all of these snippets that are in the search results and pull out the the video id and see if we already have one of those videos then we want to create one if we haven't if we have then we want to probably snapshot like the title and description of the video because those are the things that we're going to be controlling with this we might also even want to download the thumbnails and like upload them somewhere but we can get to that later so my my thought is that like each video we could have like revisions so if you wanted to you could look at like the history and what happened to the descriptions over time um so that if you accidentally like mess up and you change some template and it blows away all your descriptions you can just sort of roll that back if you wanted so that you have a little bit of like version control um so let's let's go let's go do that uh actually let's see where were we at so videos does videos have like some concept of pagination videos dot methods um no videos.methods distort so there is this token pagination i think this next page token thing is what we need and i think that we need to roll our own pagination because i don't think the client library in this case helps us unfortunately potentially let me let's let's just go like briefly look and see if there's any super nifty helpers like there is in the stripe client libraries for pagination client provides control of retry pagination and timeouts so how do i do pagination um is this is i wonder if calling each on items is that going to automatically trigger pagination or what also uh youtube let's see so pull up youtube and i'm going to go to manage videos and i don't think i have yeah okay so i only have 76 and i think you get 100 back in the list so we're not even gonna need to paginate for now anyways so that's that's fine um all right so the next thing we want to do is we have this like super basic youtube thing right that just has fetch videos so we want some way to run this fetch videos thing and then take the results of those videos and create video objects um so there's a couple different ways we could do this we could we could keep youtube in here i mean technically we could just like implement a new thing that's like fetch and save videos that like calls fetch videos iterates over them and saves them um so let's let's do like one more one more investigation into the youtube api um here i i want to see if there's some reason that we might want to retrieve um a specific video and if there's some data that we don't get from the snippet that we might want right like i don't think so there's a whole bunch of content details file naming okay yeah let's just let's just start with something super simple we can we can always build on top of that right all right so this is gonna give us back our videos and should we just call dot items i think to give us like even even more specific list i think maybe okay now in production we'll likely want this to run um how do we want this to run we probably want this to run as a background job uh but before we get there let's just write it as a task um so app oh gosh where does it go config no lib yeah lib tasks so we can say rails g task um let's see dash dash help okay so rails generate task feeds fetch erase ad so railsg task um youtube let's see i think it's gonna generate okay cool so then it's generating a youtube rake task where we can say task um fetch videos fetch videos environment do and then technically you can pass like a um an argument to the block but i think we just want to call like y equals youtube dot new youtube session do video and technically that's going to be like a search result right and so then we're going to we're going to need to like mess around with that in here so let's let's pull up the the search result object again just to like see [Music] um have to do those two steps again y dot fetch videos and now we should just get our items which is right and then um videos dot first dot snippet okay so then we want to we just want to pull out the snippet so actually like in fetch videos or in youtube in the fetch videos method i'm going to say items.map and i'm going to i'm going to have it pull out the snippet directly from there so when we call fetch videos we're just getting back the snippets so that we can just like call methods directly on those okay so now we should be able to just like say puts um puts uh let's see video.id puts video.title puts video.description and let's just see what happens so in order to run this rake test we're going to say rake youtube colon fetch videos so rake youtube colon fetch videos and this will run our little task that we've written i think undefined method id for snippet okay perfect so here okay so there is no id uh what is there channel id thumbnail description publish that wow okay so maybe it's in videos.first id uh dot video id okay so we we can't um we can't just use the snippet we need to use uh items because the snippet is too specific and we lose some data doing it that way so we'll go back to our task um and so now each video has a snippet and it has some like top level stuff so this is going to be like snippet.title snippet.description and we'll try this rake youtube colon fetch videos let's see what happens cool oh yeah the id it's like id dot video id right id dot video id awesome this is so cool except a payment with pearl that was an episode i did a few days ago got the code for the post the related blog post so this is looking super cool uh all right so now what we want to do is create so we want to say like um is there a video with this id already so youtube id so we're going to say like video or like um let's say vid or like external video just to keep it super clean and then we'll create oh we'll like look up the video here so video equals video dot find by um youtube id um external video dot id dot video id and if video dot nil then we want to create the video so video dot create bang and here we're gonna set title equal to snippet.title and uh right so and youtube id is ex let's just say like let's just make this like id equals okay so we're going to create a new video we're going to set its title this is where we would also like create the description snapshot um but let's just see let's just see how this goes so yeah it's not gonna have a description template or anything i was thinking about having the description template be based on which playlist it's in but for now we'll just assume that the whole channel has some description template and then we can we can get fancy with it later so um all right so let's cross our fingers and hope this actually creates a whole bunch of videos that would be super cool and a craft a description template must exist doe oh gosh okay so we'll just say like uh description template dot last we'll have to come fix that later because yeah that's an annoying dependency but um okay so reload from the rails console and i'm gonna just say like video.count and there are six interesting what why are there six oh oh my gosh this is so odd okay uh so that is definitely a video that's a video are these all private i wonder if these are just the ones that are not actually live no except a pearl's live or i'm sorry except a payment with pearl is live how come there's only seven results uh only seven videos okay so now we get to figure out what's going on videos.items.com video wait videos.com five huh i wonder if five is the default is the default limit on the results so pagination page info total results uh limit youtube search dot list max results okay so let's try that uh so in in our youtube thing um i wonder if it goes in options or max results here and can i just say like 100 and is that gonna give me more reload okay cool wide out videos or why not fetch videos okay unknown keyword let's see if i put it in here boom okay uh videos is equal to underscore and then videos.count five what in the world um okay so let's uh okay so we have we have y y dot service dot list searches snippet for mine is true and type is video and then options is authorization is y dot uh auth client okay so r dot methods dot sort i'm just trying to figure out what's going on with um the pagination and the the limit here why we're only getting back that many pages so in parameters here like the way that this example is showing it seems like we should be able to pass in max results into list max results is an unsigned integer oh 0 to 50. let's try 50. oh and it goes optional parameters i think it goes here so max results 50 no okay we're still getting back just five items how do we pass this thing um it's almost like like i expected to be able to pass it in the same place that i'm passing the filter but optional parameters channel id channel type okay what in the world all right we're going back to the library here we got to read it because the docs are not helping us very much so list searches and does this thing take in a limit all right so it takes the part channel id channel type event type for content or for mine location location radius max res okay so max underscore results of course so it's not called max results like that it's called max results the ruby way and now if i do are to items account 50. so 50 is fewer than our total so we will need to paginate so where do we want i think we do want to do the pagination here inside of this youtube thing and then we'll just like um actually this would be kind of cool so let's do let's do the pagination and then we'll yield we'll yield each of the so we'll we'll update fetch video so that it takes a block and then we will execute the block for each video that is returned in the search results that way we can paginate and it should be transparent [Music] rather than just like fetching every single video and returning it all in memory um i think if we do it by uh yielding those videos to a block then if there's more and we haven't broken like if the block hasn't returned and like broken out of execution then we can keep executing um i think that might be how we want to do this so let's just make this take a block and the first thing we'll do is we're going to get our items back actually now we need to like break this up a lot because we need to handle the case of of needing to paginate so how do we get the next how do we get the next items in the list so here we have max results let's make this one just so that we have like an id and here we can say in which we implement authentication the youtube api cool but this thing should have a next page token so this next page token i think we need to be able to pass that in somewhere um page token the page talking parameter specifies a specific page in the result set that should be returned in an api response the next page token and previous page token properties identify other pages that could be retrieved so here we want to say like um is it next underscore or just page underscore token is equal to and then like this big string um okay cool great so that was the previous episode so that should work so in order to implement pagination we need to store off the page and what we're going to do is actually yeah how do we know all right how do we know if we're at the last page so let's let's remove the page token from our api call here uh nope we want to do max results 50 so that we can get the next page token um art up next page token okay cool so then we want to say page token is equal to r.next page token and cool art next page token should be nil no [Music] um is it ever gonna end oh we're back to the first page weird okay um that's odd uh okay how the heck published before published after q region code related to video save search topic id how the heck oh order sort the order of the results i bet we need to pass an order because otherwise how does it know which page we're talking about so let's go back to search list order which one to order by date right like order date cool let's try that so now we're going to say order date i'm expecting that at some point we get no results back or that r dot next page token is nil there we go okay so yeah so next page token is nil we're at the end here this is like the oldest video that i have up uh it's actually kind of cool it's of uh me with some uncles um making windows 3 work so um yeah cool um so let's do that so we're going to check if um well okay so we want to do um page.items dot each do item block dot call item and then if we're if we haven't uh how does this work so if in the block so someone's so the user of this is going to go the user of this is going to do something like so we're going to say fetch videos instead of each do we're just going to say dot do and then if somewhere in here we say return right that'll break out and we won't go to the next page if if we haven't already so we're grabbing a page if we get to the end and there is like more um let's see so we i think yeah we're gonna want like a while loop right like or some sort of loop in order to go back to the beginning alternatively we could recursively call this but that's a little gnarly and dangerous too depending on how deep your stack goes so let's implement it by saying like um um how do we want to do this i'm going to use a do while loop uh do and while page dot next page token dot nil well it's not nil uh this is a do while loop i am like super weird for liking do while loops but yeah okay so um so sorry i'm trying to think through the best way to do this while uh next page token is not nil do this thing um yeah like technically we want to run it twice right like we want to run it without without any page token and then we do want to run it again with a page token but the first time page isn't going to have any next mix page token which is fine so let's just try it do we'll do a do while so do this thing while page dot next page token is not nil so at the end of this if the page token if the next page token is not nil that we want to pass it in here um page token is equal to nil which is okay at the top there and then down here we can say like page token equals page.next page token and while page token is not nil oh this is fun this is super fun okay so the first one when we pass nil that's gonna be fine i think that gives us the first page of results that's totally cool um and then we're gonna iterate and pass or like yield the items to the block which is cool and then after we've gone through all of those items if the blocks are executing successfully then we're going to end and we're going to pull off the next page token and if that's nil that means that there are no more pages and we'll end if it isn't nil then we will execute this loop again and pass the page token here i think this is going to maybe work let's try it uh oh gosh we need some tests we totally need some tests real c um actually let's let's just run our uh rake youtube video or fetch videos i think that's what we called it yeah uh yeah fetch videos oh is do while not supported anymore does it begin is it begin end while ruby do while i haven't written one of these uh for a long time i i once did an interview where i just like used um do while loops the whole time just for fun uh okay for oh gosh how do you do a do while loop do oh come on i thought there was a do while is there no loop do or do while loop do and then it just has a break okay fine loop do break if page token dot nil that's not as fun but whatever let's see um run our rake task again oh it's taking a long time that's exciting that's exciting okay reel c how many videos do we have video.count 101. wait that's too many it's supposed to only be 76 i think right i wonder if this is only counting uploaded okay so then my lives how many lives do i have 25. okay so that's actually exactly right cool so we go back to uh localhost come over here go back home [Applause] oh look at that sweet hey very cool these are all the videos and they have been imported and yeah so we're going to call that the end of this episode in the next session what we're going to do is take each of these videos and make a button on this page that when we click it it will update the description on that video so um yeah i'm wondering if before we do that if we want to implement the logic for snapshotting the descriptions so that we don't lose them um okay well to be determined we'll see you next time

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