--- title: Update Videos with the YouTube API slug: update-videos-with-the-youtube-api published_at: 2021-02-19 18:00:00 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:27 +0000 summary: description: Updating videos on YouTube using the YouTube Data API v3 with Ruby. Walking through the process of making an API call to sync content updates for a YouTube video Title and Description. 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: [Ruby, YouTube api Ruby, YouTube api rails, YouTube api update video, YouTube data api Ruby, ruby on rails, ruby on rails 2021, ruby on rails 6, youtube api, youtube api tutorial, youtube api v3, youtube data api, youtube data api v3, youtube api key, youtube api project, ruby on rails 6 course] views: 1554 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/update-videos-with-the-youtube-api youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-azSl5-EI youtube_id: ae-azSl5-EI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ae-azSl5-EI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ae-azSl5-EI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Update Videos with the YouTube API *Published: February 19, 2021* *Views: 1554* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-azSl5-EI) [![Update Videos with the YouTube API](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ae-azSl5-EI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-azSl5-EI) ## Description Updating videos on YouTube using the YouTube Data API v3 with Ruby. Walking through the process of making an API call to sync content updates for a YouTube video Title and Description. 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 welcome back to this series where we're building a tool in ruby on rails to manage descriptions of youtube videos um so we've gone through the process of modeling our database building out some views we went through a whole video about how to authenticate with the youtube api using rails in the previous video we used this search list endpoint from the youtube data api to fetch all of our videos and populate the model data in this in this episode what i want to do is uh the end goal is that we walk away and we have updated the description of some video on youtube one of our videos on youtube so um so what i think we want to do is extend our existing video or our existing class that we have for interacting with youtube and we want to add support for passing in some content in order to update the video request so you must specify the id snippet title um let's see only required if the request updates the videos resources snippet category id properties only required if it updates the video resources snippet um you can also set these so this is the one that we really care the most about right now is updating snippet.description and i don't actually know how this is going to work so if we head back over to we've been referring directly to this google api ruby client which provides some methods for interacting with the youtube api let's see if there's an update method update video okay cool update video and then it takes apart the video object i don't know what that is let's see what is the video object the video oh wow it takes the actual youtube okay interesting interesting i wonder if that is uh required all right and then it takes uh the fields and quota users options okay so let's let's just like um mess around with this so so if we have this fetch video thing let's make an update video method uh def update video and i don't know what it's going to take yet but let's see here so part video object this video object thing is throwing me off a little bit but i think we can figure it out so make a simple command it's a put request to youtube v3 videos and i believe that matches what this endpoint is doing right put request to youtube v3 video so that is the right request request representation uh video representation request object the video object okay so i wonder if we can just new up an instance of a video object set its description and then pass that in here and if that will like be good enough um i don't know let's see so what do we want to do we want to call service dot update video and we want to pass in part what is the part who cares about the part is the part just snippet oh wow okay so this one has a whole bunch of other stuff content details all right so we need to figure out what a video um i think we're just updating the snippet because that's where the description lives so is that one of the parts we can update uh snip it yeah okay so let's pass that as the part um part oh no just uh snip it um which is the same as above right same as when we listed so we're going to update the video and then we need to pass in a video object so how do we new one of these up um sorry i keep switching over to that view uh let's see if yeah how do we how do we make one of these uh hmm video intelligence no we want just a youtube video uh oh gosh okay so youtube video i wonder if i can just say new and then pass description is like test and uh i think there was another thing that we had to pass like at a minimum right um so we need to pass the id um let's just say id is equal to and then let's pick a specific video from our list here ruby on rails okay so yeah sure this is an id that's not quite public yet or a video that's not quite public yet so we'll give it that id um actually let's let's pull this out and just say this and in in the back of my head i'm thinking okay if the if the api is expecting an object that looks like this we should probably take in one of an instance of our local video objects and then convert it to this thing which is just a matter of like passing in the descriptions and such from our local object potentially and this actually is probably like in snippet like this i bet i'm not sure but i'm just kind of guessing at this point um because there i don't see a way to like i don't i don't see where this is defined um class video there's no yeah okay so maybe it's in this representation thing representations oh classes interesting video class video uh okay so it's just giving you the json json orientation class video okay cool here we go here we go all right so tons of outer assessors one of them is an id that's good um and we can initialize it with a bunch of args and are any of them a description description video localization okay so this might be more interesting video snippet oh my gosh okay so we're gonna have to like figure out all this stuff to make a video okay so class video uh okay no come on chrome okay all right so age gating content details details about the content of a youtube video i think maybe there's a snippet thing in here okay snip it here we go boom snip it so snippet should not be a hash it should be a new instance of this thing nope this thing dot new and that takes i think a description so now let's go to class video snippet and this has the category id channel id channel title default language and description cool all right so let's see so this is making the new video all right there was some other stuff here yeah so this property is only required if the video updates the video resources snippet and this okay so title and category are both required it's so interesting so title is testing and actually let's just make sure that we copy the title all right so that that was the previous title um description is test and then what was the other requirement here the other requirement is that if we're changing we have to set the category id i don't actually know what the category id is right now for these videos but if we do indeed have to set this then we're gonna need to store it when we fetch the video because i don't know what these are unless we can just like hard code it to the same category for every single video so why don't we look at uh yeah let's go through our process for creating a new instance of this service thing and fetching it so y and then y dot fetch videos that first or no and then we have to say oh you know what yeah okay because fetch videos only accepts a block so we can't actually interact with it as easily okay so we're going to fetch one video or one one like search result r dot items dot first dot snippet dot category id no uh channel id channel description yeah we're just looking for the category id class.new.methods okay where can we find the category id snippet category id i don't it doesn't seem like this is on the actual thing um so do we need to try to use list videos and pass in that id just to get the category id once we have it i think i might just hard code it because these are all going to be like how to programming videos in fact like i wonder if we can just like hack around this and say show more what is okay so categories entertainment inspect let's see what is this thing change this to i'm just gonna like look at the logs and change it to um education and then hit save and then a whole bunch of api requests happen and did any of them uh let's see what were any of these um i want to see the post requests and i want to see the category id 27 category new category 27. let's just try it and see what happens so just hard code it to uh category oh i bet it's is it snake case or camelcase let's see so we have to pass in the category id yeah category id so category id 27 sure and then let's make a comment here since that's a magic number uh i think okay so service update video and what else do we need to pass for update video we've got our part we got our video object i think i'm going to skip this other stuff and then i think options is probably the same as the options above here oh gosh max results did we not do this okay oh we were just okay so all right so our pagination for fetch videos worked but it was doing them five at a time because that other option doesn't do anything um but the pagination is working just kidding uh pages five five videos at a time now it should work with 50 videos at a time i forgot to update that but i wanted to grab these these options here because i think these are what we're going to need down here in order to actually update this video so um yeah i think fingers crossed maybe let's just give this a whirl and see what happens um so i'm going to reload here and then i'm going to create a new y equals thing okay and then why to update video and let's just see what happens oh my gosh i think it might have totally worked all right let's go check out our videos here so manage videos and the one we were messing around with was part three of this series so let's see what the description looks like holy moly we have a description and it says test and that's super cool all right i'm pumped this is cool this is super cool uh all right we're working we're working with the api here we're working with the youtube api to do real stuff okay so now this is where it gets super interesting because now what we want to do is like edit our description so that it uses this description template we use the same title and now we want to say like um presenters and we want to say i want to just like put in some information that's coming from the video in the database um presenter.name and yeah we'll say all three of them are presenters and we'll say update video so this is what the description looks like um yeah that's what the description looks like let's go edit our template too edit sirius so that it doesn't have the title at the top and go back to our videos to part three here alright so this is the description we want it to spit out or that we wanted to to use to update the video on youtube so let's update our our update video method here to take in a video object um external video external video and then here we're going to pass it information from our existing video object so this id is going to be video.youtube id uh title is going to be video.title education is going to be our thing and then we'll say video let's see dot description so that should render our erb template and spit out a description that will then be sent to youtube but now this definitely requires a video so we need to pass it a specific video um but let's try it out from rails console and see what happens okay so y dot up update update yeah that update video and this video has id3 so we'll say video dot find three and then cross our fingers and hope it doesn't explode oh man holy guacamole refresh the page oh so cool that's so cool oh man i love it this is so awesome so it is pulling in our descriptions and totally this is this is so cool i love this um all right so we have built a we have built a video manager in rails so i'm gonna i'm gonna call this episode here and then in the next episode i want to um what are we going to do we are going to uh yeah i think we're going to keep track of the descriptions in like versions of the descriptions so that we can roll back if we want to i also want to extend the video objects so that we can attach metadata to it so that in our templates we could build templates that use metadata on the video so that you could put literally like any content that you wanted in in the back of my mind i was like oh it would be cool to tag each video with if whether or not it was ruby or rails or javascript or react or whatever and then potentially have links to different resources or different playlists or different like whatever just based on the metadata that's in the video um so uh yeah so then let's let's do that in the next in the next session so um also we should blow this away and all that blow all the data away and then re-ingest it and set up some more legit templates and more presenters and such because it's like for now it wouldn't be a huge lift to add myself and some other things also it looks super ugly um so we got to clean that up make it make it pretty and make it look uh make it look even more usable so in the next one that's kind of the plan so we'll see in a bit --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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