--- title: Tagging videos with the YouTube API slug: tagging-videos-with-the-youtube-api published_at: 2021-02-22 18:00:13 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:28 +0000 summary: description: Tag YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API V3 with Ruby. 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: [youtube tags, youtube api, youtube data api, Tagging videos with the YouTube API, YouTube API v3 ruby, YouTube API Ruby, YouTube Ruby on Rails, Tag YouTube Videos, YouTube API v3, Ruby on Rails, Rails, Ruby, youtube api tutorial, youtube data api v3, ruby on rails 2021] views: 664 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/tagging-videos-with-the-youtube-api youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDx41b54UWs youtube_id: zDx41b54UWs embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/zDx41b54UWs thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zDx41b54UWs/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Tagging videos with the YouTube API *Published: February 22, 2021* *Views: 664* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDx41b54UWs) [![Tagging videos with the YouTube API](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zDx41b54UWs/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDx41b54UWs) ## Description Tag YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API V3 with Ruby. 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 what's up friends in the last episode we uh made a push to update a video through the youtube api uh today what i wanted to do was go through the process of just improving the editing experience so right now we have a description template that you can pick so you can pick a specific template that you want to actually render and you can you can edit the the chapter markers this is actually the list of chapter markers you can give it a title but then it uses the description template and all of the attributes about the video that we're storing in the database along with yeah along with that template to render what you ultimately see so what i wanted to do is just improve this experience i have a couple ideas one is i think we need a summary and the summary will go above in the description so if you look at like um let's see uh how about how about this yeah so html video audio source um there's actually okay so this one doesn't even have anything at all but if we find like a super highly ranked video right learn perl tutorial so this person has at the top they have code and transcript they have a book on perl then they have their table of contents and then they have like this this might be just kind of like a bio a biography of the person and then they have a patreon they have links and they have whatever these are like the people maybe these are the patreon supporters and then links to some stuff um yeah you can support these videos on patreon so like this kind of stuff you might want in every single video and then the chapter markers and then maybe yeah so code and transcript here maybe this is like the summary of uh of the video um actually i'm kind of curious let's see what does this go to new think tank so it's just like a short url that goes to this blog post um but yeah so i think we want to summary i think we might also want like a subtitle like a so we have a title right now but i think we might also want a subtitle so let's add and the reason is that i think um i think that will come in handy when we go to generate thumbnails when we have like a heading and then like a subheading and i think technically like the title will probably be like what series it's part of um maybe we give it an optional series and then title and then we can use those to generate the thumbnail not not exactly sure but maybe it's called like theme or something and then we'll have like certain theme ids but i know for sure that we want to we want to summary so let's let's add that rails g migration adds summary to videos summary is a text blob and that looks good break dv migrate okay let's go to our videos controller and support adding a summary and then let's go to our video form and add a summary field where you can add a summary what do we got here this is our nope wrong wrong form edit okay so chapter markers it's going to be similar to chapter markers as a text area we'll call this summary and summary all right if we refresh the page here now we have a summary section so um the other thing is that when we're in the edit view i think we do want to have probably an embed of the video if not i think we want to see um potentially see like some sort of rendering what of what it would look like of what the description would look like given this template um so you can kind of do like a preview um maybe you click a button to see the preview because you have to kind of like save and then view and so uh yeah let's let's just embed the video first just so we have something to look at video show and then this is the embed tag uh you know i think i'm actually going to make the embed tag a helper yeah let's do that so in application helper no app app location controller yeah sure um we'll just make a helper method uh video embed and um here doc html and html okay so this is this little thing in ruby is called a here doc you do like arrow arrow and then you can do a dash or you can do a tilde i think tilde makes it so there's no white space on the left when it actually renders and then we're going to take in so this will take a video and then we'll call video.youtube id and here we can just say like video embed at video and then we need to go application controller and call uh helper method video embed to make this method available to views uh and then if we refresh the page um here we should see it oh um dot html safe yep um oh what hmm what is going on there why why isn't that working let's see oh you know what i bet this is not supposed to be erb yeah yeah this needs to be um a string thing string interpolation instead all right refresh there we go boom we've got our video and like looking at the video is super helpful when you want to try to figure out what the chapter markers should be so like if you're watching the video and you're like okay um you turn the volume all the way down you can play your playback speed all the way up to like two and then sort of jump through like oh yeah that's right we talked about um that thing when we got to that point and then you can say like zero zero zero one is like intro and then maybe i don't know let's actually try to find like a legit thing oh so this is the video where we talked about like rendering erb rendering an erb template so let's say like uh use erb to generate template all right let's see what else did we do in this video we made we made tools for editing the description template right so zero 354 um was uh where we started creating like um create views for template management okay and then you say update video and now we have like some chapter markers which is cool now if we go back to our templates and then we edit sirius [Music] so sirius doesn't actually print out the chapter markers in the uh in the template so i'm actually surprised that they're showing up here because oh you know what i wonder if huh let's see so templates serious because it just has the presenters it doesn't actually have the chapter markers anywhere in here templates home video edit oh it's using okay here we go serious update video and so now the description doesn't have the chapter markers but if we go back to our templates and we edit serious and we say table of contents and then we say chapter markers that should print out the chapter markers on our videos cool nice look at that so we've got our table of contents now so we have our presenters and we have our table of contents that's super cool let's also put our summary there so before presenters we want to print out the summary which now exists as a thing on the videos so we can go to our sum or our video here and click edit and then add a summary so our summary in this case is like um in this episode we show how to pass a string of erb template text and render um based on the binding in the video to generate descriptions based on the metadata for each video and then we can say update video and refresh huh okay so the description did it switch back okay why is it oh okay so we've got a bug we've got a bug in our edit form where it's not keeping the selected description template so let's fix that now so we'll go to our video edit okay we've already got one open let's go there video edit and in the select box here we have these options but we're not actually marking one of them as selected if it's the one that we picked previously so we want to print out selected if i think it's selected it might be checked or something picked i don't know if um template dot id is equal to at video dot description template id let's see so now if we click edit okay cool so now it maintained sirius so sirius is still the one that i selected let's go back to our presenters too and let's add me cj villa see jav dev um and we'll say create so when we go back to our templates or back to our videos here and we edit the video huh oh that's a different video part three where'd it go all right so the order here is weird uh let's go let's go fix that too videos controller we get all let's say order um id descending so that we have the first ones at the top let's see okay yeah that's that's actually what we want i think when we fetch them again later it'll be better but um this is getting much closer to what we actually want so i'm gonna uncheck everyone else i'm the only person in this video click update and look at that that's so beautiful what a description right like in this video we show how to pass a string of table okay blah blah blah blah table of contents we got the presenters there were a couple other things that we created as a models video so if we look at the video right now we're handling the title we're not touching tags really yet and we are handling the chapter markers but we also have this video resources thing um oh gosh um video resource and a video resource has a title and a url uh and the idea here was that like if you wanted to add your like affiliate link or if you wanted to add links to the code on github or if you wanted to add links to some documentation or something you could do so with a video resource however we don't actually have like any tools or anything for creating these so one option is to use this thing called accepts nested attributes for but i don't want to do that because it's nasty um so instead what should we do what should we do i'm wondering if we should just do this this bit with javascript like from the front end right when we're in here uh maybe have like a little button where you can click the button it'll add like two input fields that say title and url and then you can click plus or something to add more and then when you click update video like those will actually or like yeah you click plus shows you the title and input you type them in and maybe when you blur it creates them um not sure not sure let's see yeah this is okay so now we're at the point where we actually need like more interactive experience right for the editing process so i do i do want to kind of reach for a front-end framework like react um but i want to try to keep it simple for for now still so um all right so we've got our chapter marker thing we got our summary let's change the order of those two um video edit let's see because i think summary is a little bit higher in the information architecture than chapter marker um what else do we want to do um yeah let's see okay why don't we mess around with tags for a little bit and then we'll come back to the concept of the resource the video resource because in my mind too i'm wondering if we should just make those part of metadata or not i don't know so let's let's do the the tags comma separated so if we say like test comma test2 this should create two tag objects in the database and right now i don't think it's doing anything so if we go look at rails c video dot find three um okay yeah look at that est so that's it's like um all right so what was let's look in the logs so we made the post request or the put request here to update um with these tags test comma test 2 and it's stored est that's weird so let's go to yeah i almost let's let's let's rename the actual parameter that we're going to pass back raw underscore tags and so what i want to do is we want to accept the tags as just a comma separated list and then when we get to either the controller or the model level we want to like change the format of what the tags are by splitting on comma and then setting them in like an array so i'm going to change the name that we're passing to the back end to raw tags and then we'll go to our video controller and we'll change tags to raw tags and now this is not a column in the database but that's totally fine we can just go to our video and i think we can just create a setter method raw tags equals and then we can say raw tags and then we'll say like raw tags dot split on comma dot map and chomp or strip strip um okay so then we can just say like self.tags equals this i think so that should take in the string that has the comma in it split it take out all the white space and then save that resulting array into tags let's see if this works so if we refresh the page and we go to edit and we'll say test comma test two comma space space blah and then say update video now if we come over here and reload and then re-fetch that same video now you see our tags have like the actual tags that we gave it they don't have any white space so it's like super clean and also then if we want to just say like video or like v equals video dot find 3 v update we can pass in raw tags as like a b c d right and that will just um that'll just update to like all of those individual tags i think so now if we just say like the same thing v dot tags and we get back a b c d e okay so that's pretty cool um but one thing to keep in mind is it looks like it's gonna overwrite or like wipe out all the tags i don't know if that's something we want yeah probably it's fine uh all right so yeah and look at that it even like looks pretty when you get to the the edit page so that's totally fine if we want to later we can add some javascript library to make this pretty and make it feel like you know the the tag input box or whatever like the cc box for an email so we've got our tags working now at least for updating our video now let's let's actually implement the logic to pass our tags on through the video api also um so if we go to videos uh update and we here oh actually we need a couple things we need to ingest the tags too i don't think we're doing that yet so tags uh yeah tags is an array so snippet.tags uh we'll have to come back over to our trusty old okay so i think it should just take tags just like that before we do that what we need to do is blow away our database and we need to update a bunch of stuff so right now we have this process that will where we have a task that will fetch videos it hits the youtube search api and fetches down the videos and then we iterate over all of the results creating video objects in our database and that happens in this task right so we're fetching the videos and then we're iterating over and we're creating video objects but right now we're not actually setting tags in here so we need to set tags equal to and i'm guessing it's snippet.tags but we'll have to see we'll have to see what happens so we want to store any tags that we already have on those videos so that we don't lose them or blow them away when we do some like bulk updates in the future um so i'm gonna say uh let's see rake db actually shoot uh yeah c dot okay so um okay this was some testing we were doing [Music] i'm going to just see this stuff in the database let's check take a take a look at linkedin here uh profile hey yeah you should reach out and let's connect um on linkedin okay there's my linkedin role developer advocate use capoeira all right ah all right so um we'll call this the default template and then we'll pass in again a here doc and actually let's let's put this above so i'm going to make a more legit seed file that's going to work or that should work most of the time so let's take a look at what we have saved because we're about to blow this away right so templates sirius this is our current template um and it looks pretty good so we've got our summary we've got our presenters table of contents which which has our chapter markers uh and then technically i think we're gonna want like our resources we're gonna say uh and then we'll say like uh video resources that each do our r dot title r.url i think and we probably only want to do like i think we only want to show like this this thing like if chapter markers if it's not blank and we probably only want to show this thing if there are some resources if videoresources.any okay i think this might be the the a template that we want to use so let's just say template or like uh template content template content all right so now we've got some legit seed data that should that should work so we'll say rake rake db drop we got a killer server db create db migrate db seed and then youtube i'll just do it as a separate desk we'll do it as a separate task um so it's blowing this is blowing away all the data that we've previously fetched and worked with oh yeah in fact we're going to need to um oh shoot we're going to need to re-authenticate too so that's cool we'll have to do that all right so now we can restart our server and okay let's add a button sorry i'm jumping all over the place let's add a button to application html that just says like connect or something like that connect youtube now we have this this button where we can go through the flow let's say okay me me all right so we're back and now we should be able to say rake youtube fetch videos and cross our fingers that it's actually setting the tags on the videos undefined method tags for search results snippet okay real c uh oh maybe it's not on the snippet maybe it's on something else shoot i bet you it's not even on the search result huh we probably have to fetch the video to get it oh darn all right let's see search list or no search overview um tags oh shoot okay so a snippet does not have tags that is unfortunate because that means that we will need not only to fetch the videos from the search endpoint we will also need to fetch the videos from the video endpoint just to get the tags i think yep darn okay we could do this that's fine so now we just have to save fetch video i think or list videos and give it a specific id uh it's probably in this one list videos [Music] okay i think there's going to be other stuff that we want to fetch in here anyway so that's i think that's fine um rate video update delete insert rate update delete okay yeah so list videos i think the way that it works is you just have to list the videos filtering by the id of the video so you just get back like one result instead of having two separate endpoints for like retrieving an individual video or retrieving a list of videos they just have one endpoint which is um yeah it's whatever all right so let's go back to our youtube class and instead of yeah so in this fetch video thing right like for each item we need to like sort of hydrate it or juice it up with a second api call which is just like fetch the individual video i wonder if we can pass in like 50 ids here or something so that we don't end up making n plus one api calls um [Music] let's see page token video category id fields oh golly all right so if we go back to the video list endpoint here the part so we definitely want to get back the tags so we can pass in wait is that not even part of the tag wait tags there yeah okay the snippet property contains tags so we'll just pass snippet as the part and then what i'm wondering is if we can give it a list of ids okay yeah here the id parameter specifies a comma separated list of the youtube video ids for the resource that are being retrieved in a video the resource id property specifies the video the video's ids all right so this is going to get a little bit hairy because now we have the page we have the search results page and then we're going to get a different page which has all the videos in it and we're gonna want to like combine the two right so all right this is getting this is getting interesting all right so we've got our let's call this at the sr page and so the search results page is the thing that we're iterating over here and i think before we even get to that we can use like srpage.items.map let's see so yeah it's going to be something like video ids rsr page.items do item and for each item we are looking for the id.video id so um item dot id dot video id so that will give us the video ids i think should give us all the video ids and then what we want to do is we want to make a second api call that is like the videos page this is going to be service dot list videos and the part is going to be snippet again and then id is going to be video ids and let's see if there's anything else that we must pass here so it looks like the part is the only required thing so i'm starting to think that we want to pass some sort of intermediate object instead of the item when we yield to the block instead of like this search result item because now we need to combine or like merge the results from the videos page with the search results page and this is this is turning out to be not a fun api to work with tell you what okay so the videos page we're listing videos we're getting back the snippet now um what is it yeah like what is that even gonna look like right like y equals okay y dot service list videos snippet id let's just give it one id that we know options authorization is y dot uh auth client and we need to grab an id oh okay i'll grab that id whoops it's not ours uh this one cool um [Music] okay all right so we got back what did we get back list videos response object and what does that give us are items those give us actual youtube videos imagine that and okay all right wait a sec wait a sec is this what we want to yield uh does this have the tags that first.tags nope are the items dot dot snippet dot tags okay do i have any tags in this one uh no test save boom okay all right so i'm changing my mind i think what we want to do is use the search endpoint just to generate this list of video ids then we want to list all the videos and that's what we actually want to iterate over is the videos page items i each and yield those directly to the block and then if there's more search results we'll go to the next page of search results and then we'll fetch this so it ends up in two api it being two api calls per page per 50 results which isn't that bad it's not as bad as if we had to do like 50 every time or whatever you know what i mean but we will have to update our task so that it no longer because i don't know like well let's just see so if we're yielding each item that's going to have snippet oh that'll actually have snippet tags snippet.title snippet.description okay and then r.items.first.id okay so instead of id we just need id i think and i think that should work all right let's see uh did i forget anything we'll see uh missing a valid api key are you sure [Music] connect youtube oh wait yeah i don't think i passed it in yeah we didn't pass it in here okay big money big money big money big money it's like when you're gambling oh my word let's see did it work uh reload reload video.count holy moly video.last oh look at that it totally has tags epic i love it this is so cool holy smokes um huh i wonder let's go take a look at that let's see what's going on there so uh this is the funny video uh go take a look go take a look go take a look um oh wow yeah look at that it has operating system in the oh my gosh this is interesting i don't know why it has this like thing in parentheses it's like it got upgraded from an old version or something like this video was uploaded i think a long time ago so there must have been some older tagging system whereby there were like subcategories for the tags so that's kind of hilarious um the other thing i'm wondering about is if seo will improve if we pass like a bunch of other stuff so like is it is this made for kids no all like almost like none of my videos are made for kids so i should probably pass that um does it have paid promotion i hmm we'll leave that as an open question for now but probably not language subtitles and closed captions the video language is always going to be probably in english unless i'm practicing espanol in which case then i would explicitly go and set it because i think that would be incredible if i yeah i'm so uh humbled by people who can speak multiple languages it's so cool um cool cool cool uh the category yeah sure save all right so other settings that we might want to set are interesting here but at this point if we go to our videos and refresh and we find this first one then it has all the stuff there which is cool and then if we say edit we've got the default you know what we should do is set the description to be this or set the summary to be the existing description yeah let's do that so when we fetch videos let's set the description or summary to equal this existing snippet.description again i think we're going to want some sort of uh tool to manage these right like or some some like version control for our descriptions but for now that should help a little bit with automating that piece of it so let's try this again so we're gonna rake db drop create migrate seed and then we'll authenticate and then we'll run our rake task oops we gotta start the server connect to youtube connecting again hit me okay and then we're gonna say uh rake fetch videos it should backfill all our videos okay if we refresh this thing and then we take a look here it's got the summary there cool um it doesn't have presenters so i'll have to say edit and then say yes i'm in this video now it has the presenters um and yeah this is looking super good i'm pretty proud of this even though like okay so it doesn't look good but it's uh it seems useful right like okay so if we go back to home and we go to our most recent videos so this one is pretty good let's edit and say this is now cj's in this um we don't have any okay so the summary of oh you know what we blew away our chapter markers that we went through that's okay all right so uh testing like adding erb template rendering for description templates using the instance of a video as the binding i don't know if that's actually technically accurate but it's whatever all right so we the things so this is going to be like rails ruby um youtube api uh erb templates i don't know probably some other stuff okay so presumably we now have these tags stored on the video and we're generating this template let's actually go back to our templates and let's edit our default template so that it has like um tags dot each do tag and for each tag let's like put a pound sign and then the tag value just so that it has like the little hashtag at the bottom so then if we go back to our videos and we go to this last video this video then yes we have this like hashtag rails at the bottom i don't know why there's we'll have to figure out what's going on to blank space here i think that's part of the template maybe um there's probably some fancy thing you can do with erb to make it so it doesn't create the white space uh but for now go back to our videos part three okay yeah i don't want them to be split out like that i want them to be like just hashtag rails space hashtag ruby space tag youtube yeah so let's go back to our templates so let's map over each tag or join let's do note map yeah map we'll say equals map all the tags to um let's see if this gives us a little bit tighter representation also i'm thinking that while you're editing the template it might be nice to feed it a video oh gosh that's funny to feed it a video so that you can see how the template looks while you're editing it right like it'd be nice to to pick a video here and see see what it looks like okay um dot join space join on space submit back to our videos okay pick the last one oh look at that super cool even though this is awkward that there's a space there um we can do maybe just api or like in fact like we'll probably just want to change what the what the the actual tag is so we'll just call it like you tube as one of them and then uh you tube data api as the second one and then we'll just like make them two separate um yeah two separate tags and then we can make like rails ruby ruby on rails okay so that's gonna come out weird too huh um yeah why don't we do why don't we do a thing where we like remove the spaces for the hashtag thing so let's go back to our template edit our template map it and then say g sub remove space or replace space with nothing let's see submit home video manager part three sick i love it that's so cool uh very cool okay so now let's i think we're comfortable with the fact that our tagging is working and the descriptions look okay so now let's go through and make sure that our update call will indeed pass these tags through so here we've got our snippet and i think we need to just pass tags video dot tags i'm not sure though so we'll just see if that works the other thing is that like in the the previous video we were running this from the console why don't we make a button on this show page for a video that will allow you to update or like sync it to youtube so let's go to the video show and we'll make a new button up here okay so we're going to make a new route called sync that's on the videos controller it's going to be a member route and then we'll just make the button say sync all right and the reason why i want to use a post request is because this is going to actually take a real action it's just not it's not a link it's not a get request this is something that is going to take a real real action so videos controller sync and we want to find the video by id and then we want to call yeah okay so why is youtube.new youtube session.last so we need to figure out what the what's going on with this whole youtube session thing like youtube sessions should be associated probably with some sort of authenticated user so that it's scoped and people aren't messing with each other's stuff and whatever we're gonna have to go through and like update basically everything so that you cannot take actions on behalf of other youtube accounts which we can totally do so um what is this going to do again oh right y dot update video and we pass in at video then we want to say redirect to um back okay there's like a fallback thing that was relatively new rails redirect to back um yeah rails five something changed where now you have to say redirect back fallback location here we go um [Music] cool so this is this update video call is actually making the api call to youtube to update it so let's let's i don't know let's see all right we got a sync button oh you know what we need to set up a route so what we could do is we could say here we could say just like post to videos slash colon id slash sync goes to videos pound sync this would totally work but what i want to show you is you can say you can pass a block to the resources method so we can say resources videos do and then inside of here you can say collection do and member do now collection uh if you add like another thing in here like post to slash sync um this will create a route that is equal to like slash videos sync so when it's on a collection it's doing it on all the videos and when it's on a member it's on an individual video so this is the same as like videos colon id slash sync so in this case we want it to be a member route because we want it to operate on an instance of a video and we're going to just say post let's see if that is enough so we can say rails routes pipe grip sync and see what happens missing action key on routes definition alright so it actually does need like uh post i don't know let's see sync that work i'm guessing oh cool no that totally worked see look at that it's a post request post request to slash video slash id sync perfect so that's what we want all right so we'll refresh the page and then when we click on this button we expect that the description on this video is updated so if we look at the video now this was an old description a test thing that had tony stark and stevie from minecraft so we're going to click on sync and cross our fingers hope nothing explodes we got redirected back which is expected and then if we come over here and refresh this page and pause look at that we've got a summary we've got our presenters we've got our tags so cool all right so let's if we click on edit video here let's see if the tags got updated and i think they did oh oh wait no uh down here show more tags oh sick this is so cool i love it this is so fun oh my gosh i hope you guys at home are enjoying this as much as i have um so this is this is very cool uh all right i think we can call it there we're syncing like a ton of stuff to youtube now um i got us yeah we still got to figure out what's going on with all this white space and try to like blow that up but otherwise i am quite pleased with how this is turning out so um yeah until next time ciao --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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