--- title: Refresh YouTube API OAuth Tokens with Ruby slug: refresh-youtube-api-oauth-tokens-with-ruby published_at: 2021-03-24 17:00:06 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:21 +0000 summary: description: Refreshing YouTube authentication tokens using Ruby. This builds on a previous episode where we setup authentication with the YouTube API. Setting up YouTube API Authentication in Ruby on Rails: https://youtu.be/KDkLQAcsCXg 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: [refresh OAuth tokens, Refresh tokens for YouTube API, YouTube Data API, YouTube API with Ruby, YouTube API Authentication, Refresh YouTube tokens, Video manager, YouTube API, Ruby, Rails, Ruby on Rails, ROR] views: 1169 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/refresh-youtube-api-oauth-tokens-with-ruby youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsw_eTVpIM youtube_id: KCsw_eTVpIM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KCsw_eTVpIM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KCsw_eTVpIM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Refresh YouTube API OAuth Tokens with Ruby *Published: March 24, 2021* *Views: 1169* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsw_eTVpIM) [![Refresh YouTube API OAuth Tokens with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KCsw_eTVpIM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsw_eTVpIM) ## Description Refreshing YouTube authentication tokens using Ruby. This builds on a previous episode where we setup authentication with the YouTube API. Setting up YouTube API Authentication in Ruby on Rails: https://youtu.be/KDkLQAcsCXg 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 what's up everyone in this video we're going to talk about how to refresh your auth tokens for the youtube api so we've got there's actually a couple different approaches that we're going to talk about and this is the error that you might run into cygnet authorization error in videos controller or in whatever controller and it will say that the client secret is missing or it's an invalid request this is actually because we attempted to make an api call to the youtube api and our authent our our auth token for making that call has expired and so in the gem that google has provided it has a built-in mechanism for attempting to refresh the token um using these like additional properties and so this client secret it's actually talking about the oauth client secret and the oauth client id that are used for exchanging those refresh tokens and refreshing those tokens so when it says the client secret is missing it's a little misleading because it's actually because your token has expired and we haven't properly configured the service to to update our auth token and so what we could do technically is here directly in our youtube service that we've implemented where we have our logic for uploading a video or we have our logic for you know uploading thumbnails or fetching channels or fetching the videos for a channel all of these are passing in this options block when we make api calls to youtube where we're passing the auth client now by default we set up our client very simply where we're just passing in this credentials json blob that we get when we first authenticate to youtube now if we were to properly configure this we could do something like so where we say at auth client dot update and we can pass in a few things so it's going to want the client id and this is our oauth client id and the client secret which is the oauth client secret and both of these exist in our credentials so rails.application.credentials.dig youtube and client id and same thing here except we're going to pass in client secret secret and okay so this should pull out our client id and client secret from our encrypted credentials and then we also need to pass in an additional uh proper additional parameters argument that says that the type of request we're making is offline because the customer or the user in this case is not online with us and so we say access type is offline now by doing this by passing this update into the auth client now when we refresh the page or try to take an action where we're uploading in this case we are syncing a description to a video so if i confirm and say resubmit this should succeed and it's succeeding because as it's trying to or like before it attempts to make its request to youtube let's uh let's clear this out before it makes its request to youtube it checks to see if that auth token is valid and if it's invalid then it automatically refreshes it for us now the downside to this is that as soon as we authenticate the first time and that token expires then every single subsequent api request is going to need to refresh the token and make an api call to um to the api here to to refresh the token and so that's because we're not actually updating at session.credential so i wanted to do what i wanted to do today was just build a background task that runs once daily and refreshes the token and stores the updated and refreshed access token on our our youtube session so that you only have to log in once and then every single day we get a new token and uh then anytime you want to use that token we already have a fresh one and we don't have to like re-fetch a new one there's probably another like really clever approach that we could take where we check to see if it needs to be refreshed here and like lazily refresh it um but i wanted to talk about background jobs so we're going to do we're going to do it in the background job um so okay so let's go to our youtube token job and here what we want to do is i think we're going to just shell back out to that or like use that service which already has everything that we care about in order to refresh the token so i think what makes the most sense is saying that we want to perform this on a user because each user has could have many youtube sessions so if we go to the user model um we're going to just pass in the user id and then grab that user user.find uh user id and the reason we want to pass the user id instead of the user here well this is this is my own i guess it's my own preference or something that i've learned before is that you want the arguments to perform to be serializable so this should be like strings or numbers or whatever instead of instances i think there's some magic that can happen in rails where it'll figure out like if you're passing a model how to like find it and update it and such but this is this is the pattern that i generally use um so in order to get the the session that we care about we want to get the users youtube sessions.last and we want to initialize a new youtube service with that session.credentials and then what i think we want to do is inside of this youtube service we'll implement a new method called like refresh token or something refresh token and um we will expect that this returns um returns the refresh token data just and then over here in the actual job then we can like store it in credentials and save it off so we'll call like y dot refresh token and then this is going to be like our new token and we're going to need to like this new token data that we get back is just going to be like a little bit different from credentials so we'll want to merge it with credentials and then save the credentials so like merge with existing creds and save okay i don't actually know what that looks like yet so let's see if we can get this working so our auth client here should say something like uh auth let's see auth client.refresh i think that might be all that we need to do is call auth client.refresh bang and um that should give us back our creds so if we were to like just use do this in a in a terminal session i'm going to start up redis server over here and i'm also going to set up the q the the worker so that our background jobs are working locally and then we've got our rail server running and the let's see what did we want to do oh let's just jump into rails console and see if that actually refreshes as we expect so if we say like um initialize a new service and pass in youtube session.last.credentials and then if we say y dot refresh token ah so it doesn't take it doesn't take credentials it takes the session so it takes the entire session um in that case we might be able to just say like bang and then have it update the session directly but i kind of like not having it save or like i want to try to keep all of my persistence logic outside of my service so the service is really just wrapping up the api calls and not actually dealing with the database and i'll keep my database interaction outside of the service and i think it's okay to keep it in the job yeah i kind of treat the the the job the perform the stuff we perform in the job similar to what we would perform in a controller action uh that's just kind of like a mental model that i've had um so we actually want to initialize this differently we don't want to pass in credentials we just want to pass in the whole thing and then we want to say why dot refresh token okay cool so this is the refresh token that we got back and it has the access token expires in and the scope so if we look at the um the last one um yeah so the last session is youtube session.last. and it had credentials and its credentials included the authorization url and the filter url and like a whole bunch of different things but one of those was the access token so that is something that we want to update um we probably also want to update expires at to be whatever time.now time.now.2i which is this minus that so it expired that many seconds ago or whatever and so we want to update the the expires at and the refresh token or no it's just the access okay so let's see we get back the access token expires in scope and the token type so i think we might just need to update the access token and expires in so this is going to be something like this we want to say like credentials is user.you are like the session.credentials and then we want to say creds access token is equal to the new token at access token and then we want to say creds at expires at is equal to time.now.2i plus the new tokens um what did it give us expires in so that's going to be like the number of seconds or milliseconds or whatever okay i think this might work and then we can just save it let's see so then we can say session.credentials equals creds and then session.save bang we want to use a save bang here instead of just a normal save because we want this to raise an error if something fails so that we can see it in the logs and we can we can actually then rerun or like retry this if we find a bug and we want to we need to retry it so let's see if this works so refresh youtube token job right now our token is expired right because this expires in i have a an alfred workflow called df which is super handy you can just drop in one of these time stamps and then it tells you what the real time is so today is actually the 14th of march not the 11th of march so this token is expired and the token used to start with what did it start with before and the access token let's see it ended in like 8zt or something so that's cool clear let's actually just restart this and then we'll perform this later so we'll say perform later now this should execute as a background task using our our rescue workers so when we run that it encude it and it should be doing stuff and executing and we might not actually see any output from this but we could open up localhost 3000 slash jobs and we can see that it failed refresh okay so wrong number of arguments zero given one expected in perform number four okay so when we call perform later we need to give it a user id so i forgot to give it a user id and it's it takes in i'm just going to give it argument number one which is user id one and we're going to just remove that job because retrying it with the wrong number of arguments isn't going to really buy us anything and it's not going to work so i think that may have executed um and we can oh there it goes okay or maybe that was copy paste i don't know let's so if we if we um if we check out the youtube session.last.credentials access token then the old one recall that the old one ended in like 8yt or 8zt and this one now ends in gug and the expires at is in the future and the way that we can confirm that this works is we need to comment this out because right now the way that this is set up is this would like resolve a new token and work anyway um so let's refresh our add a categories feature and we'll edit it and maybe we take the quotes out from categories and the whole point of that is so that on the actual youtube video over here we're gonna like change what the title is to have no quotes so then we're gonna update the video and click sync and it looks like that that totally worked okay so no quotes anymore we we were able to make that api call so that succeeded and that's great so that means that this this we're going to put this back in because this is going to be what we're going to fall back to and this will lazily refresh our access token if we need it otherwise we're going to run this background task once per day so that we don't actually have to lazily refresh the access token okay so just as a recap what did we do we uh we updated our refresh youtube token background job so that it found a user in their most recent youtube session so this is their their login session uh and then we updated our youtube service so that it had a refresh token method that uh refreshed the auth token and when that token came back we updated our database representation for the token the access token and when it expires and then we save that on the session so that next time we make an api call to youtube we have fresh credentials we also updated our auth client method inside of the service so that it passed in the client id client secret and these additional parameters for the access type being offline so that if we're attempting to make an api call with an expired token this will just refresh one lazily just in time so that we can uh we can actually refresh our token so hopefully that's helpful this should pair really nicely with the initial episode we did about how to authenticate to youtube so this is really like after you've authenticated how do you keep your tokens up to date as you go along let me know what you're building with the youtube api comments and yeah we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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