--- title: Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube Data API slug: upload-a-video-to-youtube-with-the-youtube-data-api published_at: 2021-03-15 17:00:11 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:23 +0000 summary: description: Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube Data API with ruby on rails. 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: [Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube API, YouTube API, YouTube Data API, YouTube Video Insert, Insert a video into YouTube with the API, Ruby on Rails, Rails, Ruby, Google API with Ruby, Upload a YouTube video with Ruby, Upload a YouTube video with Ruby on Rails, Upload a video to the YouTube API, Tempfile, ROR, youtube api v3, upload video on youtube using youtube api, upload video on youtube channel using youtube api, upload video on youtube account using youtube api] views: 2826 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/upload-a-video-to-youtube-with-the-youtube-data-api youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5EvTSytDIM youtube_id: I5EvTSytDIM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/I5EvTSytDIM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/I5EvTSytDIM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube Data API *Published: March 15, 2021* *Views: 2826* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5EvTSytDIM) [![Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube Data API](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/I5EvTSytDIM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5EvTSytDIM) ## Description Upload a video to YouTube with the YouTube Data API with ruby on rails. 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 in the last episode we showed how to record a video uh using javascript and what we're gonna do now is show how to upload that video to the youtube api using the um the rubygem that comes with from google using the youtube data api and so the first thing that we want to do is go into our existing video recordings controller and add a new method here for create inside of which we will receive a post request with the file which contains the video that we recorded on the front end uh and then we're going to pass this and we're actually going to like this is where we're going to make a make a an api call to the youtube api and um so let's go to our routes and add this here so we're gonna say resources videos video recordings video recordings and um so so in one of the comments for a previous video someone asked is it possible to show an episode where we upload a video to the youtube api in the background with a background job um we i think between the content here and the content in another episode about background jobs we should be able to combine the two um and make that work uh but for now we're actually just going to upload sort of like synchronously or like in the controller action here um and so if we go to our we have an existing youtube service that takes in the youtube session so here i'm just going to initialize one of those and say youtube.new currentuser.youtubesessions.last so that really just like pulls out the credentials and we have another episode where we showed how to like oauth with youtube uh to set up and collect the the access credentials so then the next thing well maybe we're just going to call like why to upload video or something um so that doesn't actually exist yet so upload video what are we actually going to need here to upload the video well we're going to need the file probably a title description and that's likely a good start and so from the front end we're going to pass in the file data so we'll just pass in like params like video recordings uh and then file now note like in this case we're not actually going to store the video file anywhere inside of rails we're just going to record it on the front end when we're done we're going to upload it directly to youtube so there's not going to be any intermediate step there's no editing there's no nothing in between when we record it when it's done recording and when it's on youtube and so we're just going to pass in the file here now when we pass in a blob when we pass a blob from the front end with form data the temp file will be available on this params object so we can actually just call dot temp file here and that will give us access to the temp file and the the temp file is what youtube required for setting the thumbnail so we we had a video all about how to upload thumbnails to youtube so if you want to go check that out head over and take a look and then here we're also going to pass in the title so this is going to be like um maybe it's just going to be like a video called the like stand up from 20 21 march or something and then the description will be like um my five minute stand up from march i don't know i i when i was testing this out earlier i ran into some issues where like youtube immediately like locked the video and said it was private and locked and it it was just like sort of they considered it spam i didn't mean for it to be spam or anything but there's also a couple other things we'd probably want to pass in here like the date we want it to be published and some other information in fact like we could pass in the title and description from the front end eventually but for now let's just keep it like this and uploading the video is going to return a video object that's going to be like the youtube apis video object and then we'll just like render the json for that object back if it worked out okay so then here we have in our in our youtube service right we have in this like class that we created in our rails app we're using this google api gem for youtube v3 and we're going to need to dig into that and really like figure out exactly all the pieces required to upload a video so if you go over to the youtube api documentation under videos there is this insert api endpoint so all videos that are uploaded from here um wait what okay so they're all going to be restricted to private okay so this is what i ran into was as soon as i uploaded it it was it became private uh so we have to go into undergo some sort of audit in order to be in compliance with their terms of service so i'm not going to worry about that maybe i should i don't know but hopefully it doesn't like break the channel we'll see so uploads a video to youtube and optionally sets the videos metadata you can upload files max 128 gigs that's huge and it takes in videos of several different mime types or this octet stream and it receives a post request to this endpoint here's all the the stuff that we need to pass in the way that this works when you're making a um a post request is that when you specify the part you have to say which parts you're going to be setting when you're creating the thing and so today we're going to set the id we're going to set a little bit of information in the snippet that's like the or sorry we're not going to set the id we have to pass id so that we are returned the id we're going to set content about the snippet and about the status so the snippet is where you can set the title description tags things like that and then the status is where we're going to try to set it as private and then you can also say like notify subscribers or not if you're subscribed i i hope that i'm not going to uh ping you with this but we'll see we'll see what happens so um let's actually open up the um youtube service here so this always happens apis youtube v3 and the service and so this is going to have a method probably for insert insert underscore video okay so this is the method that we want to call as insert video and the first thing is a string that represents the part so we're here we have we have an instance of this service down below here we're initializing the instance of the service and then we also have an auth client so that we can pass in our our credentials so we're going to say service dot insert video and we're going to need these that's our authorization or authentication the part is going to be id snippet and status status and then we need to pass in the video object so we're going to need a video object which is going to be some instance of a class from from this library so in fact like if we look for this video object here right it's the second param so it's an instance of this type so google apis video okay so then we can just say we want to make a new one of those so we're going to say video object here and then that's where we're going to like create all the settings and everything for the title description and all that auto levels i don't know what that means let's actually let's look and see what that is auto levels should auto levels be applied to the upload i don't actually know what that is uh notify subscribers we're gonna say false on behalf of content owner what does that mean on behalf of the content owner it's intended exclusively for youtube content partners uh identify a youtube cms owner who's acting on behalf of the i mean i think this is probably true but whatever stabilize i don't know fields i don't know quota upload source okay so this upload source is important and that is either an i o or a string with the file name containing the content to upload so this is important so the source or upload source is going to be our file that's the temp file for the blob that we're uploading and then finally we just have like content type and we can say video webm or you can do like uh i think you can do um mp4 or whatever uh so we have our options and we got our options here so i think this is probably a decent start now we need to figure out like all the different things that we need to pass into our video object and the way that i like to do this is let's actually make a new tab and we'll go rails c and we'll require this this gem so say require oops require that rubygem for uh for this google api and then because we're using pry rails we can do this crazy thing where we can change directory into this class so i can use cd and the class name and then i can do ls to list out the methods that i that i can see on that class and this is how i kind of explore the api so i want um in this case i want to know what what actually are we what we're actually passing in right so status and snippet are two things that we can pass so let's pass those so we want uh status and we want snippet status and snippet and then we need to initialize instances of those because each of those are also classes so status is equal to something and then snippet is equal to something and i don't know if we can actually like cd status or call status let's see um ls status man status uh okay i thought there might be like a way to just poke at status and see if i could get the the docs string for that but i don't think that's possible so instead we're just going to come in here and find uh youtube video now in a in a file adjacent to the service.rb in here we have classes.rb this is where all the classes are defined um i yeah i wish there was an easier way to go through this but i think this is all just like auto-gend code and the docs don't show full ruby examples so you kind of just have to dig through the source so the thing we're looking for is class video and in here it has class or it has a status right so status is an instance of this so youtube api is okay so we're going to initialize a new instance of that and then for snippet we're going to initialize a new instance of that and for each of these we need to go like in again into pry and we'll crack these open and see what we can see so you can also use like cd dash to cd like change back into the top level you can also just like cd into each namespace and like see what things are available so if we see the apis um oh actually we probably could have done this instead of looking at the classes thing um youtube v3 and then here we see like all the different stuff that we might care about so video snippet so if we cd into videos snip it and say ls this is where it tells us that we can set the title and the description so we'll do that so we'll say in the snippet we'll say title description and then for the video status we can also do cd dot dot to go like up into the parent module cd video status and then this has the privacy status when it was published at upload status etc etc so i think the published app will allow us to um say that we want to oh this is the date the video was uploaded okay i thought that would allow us to like schedule it for a later time but maybe not but we do want the privacy status privacy status 2b what is the possible enum values for privacy status is what is this this is one of what privacy status is a string okay so it's one of private public or unlisted so we'll just make it unlisted for now so for the status we'll say privacy status is unlisted all right so we've got our video object we've got our file object that's going to be coming in from the front end um so let's go back to the front end so video recordings controller and oh no video recordings new so from here when we're done playing the video instead of just setting the source let's make a post request to video recording and instead of sending json we're going to send some form data and the form data is going to be form data is new form data and then we're going to say form data.append video recordings file and i think we can just pass chunks 0 maybe uh we'll see we'll see if we can do that okay and then we'll just comment these two out because we don't actually want to play those um all right so since we're using uh the fetch we're using like ajax to make an api call and we're not including our csrf token here what i want to do is go to the video recordings controller and disable auth or the uh sorry the csrf the csrf check um okay so if we go back to our video automations thing here and we click connect to youtube we will authenticate with youtube or authenticate to youtube and so now we're authenticated and now we should be able to go to our video recordings and create a new one so we're going to say hey what's up this is a test of our video recording system um when we click stop our expectation is that uh this will send a video directly to youtube through the youtube api um and we're opening the console here so that we can see any errors that might happen all right so i'm going to click stop and we will pull up the logs um sending upload start command to youtube sending upload command to youtube so it did pass in our file blob hey 200 holy moly alright so now if we go to youtube and pull up our channel and look at our videos manage videos we see do we see anything let's see hmm it's hanging why are you hanging oh look at that okay awesome private and locked yeah we know it's we know it's locked because of the thing we just talked about or the thing we just saw but this video was just uploaded just now this is what we just did right so hey what's up love it that's so cool okay so that's it that's uh that's how you upload a video to youtube and how you can sort of explore the classes that are in the youtube rubygem or the the google's rubygem for interacting with the youtube api um so yeah really really exciting stuff and hopefully this is helpful again um yeah you might want to be doing this uploading process as part of a background job or a background task we're going to do in a future video we're going to show how to uh write a background job for refreshing that auth token um so that you don't have to like relog in every single time you want to use this so hopefully that's useful if it was please consider subscribing we really appreciate it and if you like the video give us a thumbs up as that helps other folks find the content otherwise we'll see you next time bye [Music] friends --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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