--- title: YouTube API Authentication with Rails slug: youtube-api-authentication-with-rails published_at: 2021-02-15 18:00:13 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:28 +0000 summary: description: How to set up YouTube API Authentication with Ruby on Rails. We show how to create auth tokens. In a future episode, we cover how to refresh authentication tokens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsw_eTVpIM&list=PLS6F722u-R6ILDUeteD-A_q6Ja4SH8v95&index=19. 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: [authentication, data, oauth, rails, youtube api, YouTube API Authentication with Rails, YouTube API Authentication, How to authenticate to the YouTube API, How to authenticate to the YouTube API with Ruby, YouTube API Authentication with Ruby, youtube api key, youtube api tutorial, youtube api playlist, youtube api key 2021, youTube API Ruby, youtube data api v3, youtube data api key, youtube data api oauth] views: 2184 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/youtube-api-authentication-with-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDkLQAcsCXg youtube_id: KDkLQAcsCXg embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KDkLQAcsCXg thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KDkLQAcsCXg/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # YouTube API Authentication with Rails *Published: February 15, 2021* *Views: 2184* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDkLQAcsCXg) [![YouTube API Authentication with Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KDkLQAcsCXg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDkLQAcsCXg) ## Description How to set up YouTube API Authentication with Ruby on Rails. We show how to create auth tokens. In a future episode, we cover how to refresh authentication tokens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsw_eTVpIM&list=PLS6F722u-R6ILDUeteD-A_q6Ja4SH8v95&index=19. 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 so last time we were working on building out the views for managing our templates and this time i wanted to start connecting and integrating with the youtube api so we want to do a couple things with the youtube api we want to list the videos that we have for our channel we also want to update some videos on our channel and in my experience setting up oauth with google can be a bit tricky so following following their code snippets and code samples um you know generally when i'm implementing oauth with rails i like to use the omnioff gem uh and there is an omnioff uh strip like provider strategy for google oauth2 however i wasn't able to get it to work given the the credentials that we have so i want to just walk through the whole process so here if you look at the update or or list endpoints then when you get to the authorization section it tells you to read more about authorization and we land over here implementing oauth 2 authorization and there's a couple different auth flows that you can go through and the first thing that you need to do is go over to the google api console from the google api console you have to create a new project so we're going to create a project here and we're going to call it like a video video automation um i'm i'm not going to select an organization i'm just going to click create and that is going to create a brand new project called video automation it takes a little bit um it's not not too bad but it does take a couple minutes or seconds to fire that up and once we have a project created so we have this video automation project the next thing we want to do is enable certain apis in this case we can just search for youtube and we want to enable the youtube data v3 api there's also a reporting api and an analytics api if you're pulling if you want to pull like traffic stats like how how many views you're getting or things like that you want to use the analytics or reporting apis for pulling information about videos or updating videos we want the youtube data api and right now it's version three so we're gonna use that okay so we've enabled that api for this project now the next thing that we need to do is create some credentials we're going to tell it that we're creating credentials for the youtube v3 api we're going to be calling it from the web server we are going to be accessing user data because we want to you know pull in private videos and videos that are scheduled but not live so we can say what credentials do we need in order to set up the oauth flow we need a consent screen and the consent screen is where we can specify like what the user sees when they're agreeing to authorize access to their youtube account and we're going to pick video automation the video automation project and we can say that any any test user with a google account is going to be able to use this our app name is a video automations support is my email address there's no app logo and then we'll just say the developer contact is my email address again okay we want to add scopes the scope that we want in this case is youtube.com so that we can edit youtube videos okay so we're going to check that box and update the next thing we're going to do is save and continue okay and we want to add a test user i'm just going to add myself click add okay and then i see i see myself down here and then we're going to say save and continue so we should have a test user and we have youtube we have the scope set up um and we've got okay so we've got like several things ready to go so let's go back to the dashboard and back to credentials so now that our our consent screen is set up we want to set up an oauth2 client so that was happening in another tab here okay so now that we have our consent screen set up we should be able to go through this process now the authorized redirect uris this is the the the urls that we want to authorize google to send people to after they agree to use our service so in this case when we're in development i'm going to pass the uri to the local redirect callback so we're going to need to create this on our server it's going to live at localhost 3000 slash auth slash youtube or let's let's make it um youtube sessions slash callback and then we'll say refresh and okay so now we can create an oauth client id so we're super close um we need to okay so we're going to create an oauth client id um so this is going to be useful we want to copy this um but also there's going to be some like like uh client secret information that's going to be in this json file format when you download it often a lot of the examples that google has or written expect that you have this json file downloaded i am not going to download the file i'm going to um say i'll do this later and then when you click on the web client this is the client that we just created this oauth 2 client when you click on it you can see your credentials here i'm going to blur this out but your client id is at the top and then your client secret is underneath that so this is exactly what we need uh to set up the oauth flow in rails so let's go do that now so in rails i'm going to say rails g controller youtube sessions this is going to be a controller that is purely for connecting to our youtube channel okay so we're going to go to routes and in here we'll we'll add a resources no let's just say um get uh to like get to like off slash youtube should go to um the youtube sessions uh new view and then we'll add another one that is like um youtube sessions slash callback if we get if we receive a get request for youtube sessions actually let's make this first one i think my browser just restarted that's okay so uh if we if we receive a get request to slash youtube sessions we'll go to the new route and then if we receive a get request for youtube session slash callback will go to the callback route so these are going to be the two things that we need to like connect to a youtube channel or like authenticate to a youtube channel all right so let's go to our youtube sessions controller and we need a new action and we need a create action or a callback action so the new action this is going to be the route that we're going to browse to we'll probably put a link to this somewhere on the page and when you first make a get request this route it should redirect you to the google oauth flow so if you dig into their samples here and or let's see guides and then under guides they have server side web apps and under server side web apps they have examples in ruby which you can follow that's not what i wanted um okay so first we need to install the google api client gem let's go to gem file gem google api client bundle install this this sample shows sinatra we're not going to use sinatra so we're going to come down here and look at this example so here it says use the secrets.json file you created earlier it's super hard to read sorry but we're not actually going to use that file instead we're going to use the rails credentials so this method google api client client secrets.load is expecting that that json file to exist but there's another initial there's a there's another way to initialize an instance of this and that's just like newing it up calling dot new and passing in the data that you otherwise would have inside of this client secrets.json file so we're going to use rails as encrypted secrets to store our client id and our client secret and then we'll generate the json that would have otherwise been provided to us in that download and then we'll plop it into um into a this initializer this initializer call um and just to take a look at like the actual full example of what they show um so this oauth callback route is actually doing two things the first one is setting up the clients this client secrets object and then generating an auth client from it um and if we're coming uh or so if it's the new route this is kind of like the new route then we're going to redirect if it's coming back after the authentication then this is what's going to happen we're going to get back a code query string parameter and we're going to set that on the auth client so this is what we're going to go through next is uh setting this bit up so i'm just going to copy that um prettier i i set up prettier and it's it's uh it's killing me off client okay so the first thing i want to do is i'm going to break this up so that like these two pieces go in here and then these these pieces all go into the callback and then we'll we'll talk about each of these lines as we go but what i wanted to do was just like abstract away a little bit of what's happening so that we can more easily see this so our redirect uri is right now it's currently uh let's see localhost 3000 slash youtube session slash callback right and we can double check that from the console um from the console here yep so youtube session slash callback so this is our redirect uri we want that to match um this okay the next thing we want to do is set our auth client so that it's passing the correct scope but it's also passing our redirect uri now there's another there's another set of two optional arguments that we want because we're going to be maybe running processes in the background to re-fetch you know youtube videos as they happen and then re-update them and maybe maybe lots of stuff that's happening in the background or like overnight we want to be able to run this offline or when the customer is like not on session or when the person when the user is not on session so the way we're going to do this is we're going to pass in this this property called additional parameters so additional parameters and here we're going to say access type is offline and we're also going to pass include granted scopes so that we can do incremental auth now if i just return off client here and then start using it up here as a as just like a as a bear word right when we redirect this should work fine because we can actually just make this railsy and that that actually works redirect too this is a little bit more common and then since we're just calling this we can use that instead so our redirect will work fine however our callback method if we look closely at in what it's doing the way that we've implemented the auth client right now won't work so first we say call the auth client method and get what the return value is so it runs all this stuff and says like load up the client secrets and generate an authorization and then update it and then return an auth client and then for the auth client that was returned set its code but on the next line we say authclient.fetchaccesstoken and when we use authclient here a second time in the callback function that is going to execute this auth client method again and so we're going to be like the second line here in the callback method is going to get a second instance of auth client so what we want to do instead is memoize the return value of this entire method and we could do that a couple different ways there's like you know gems and stuff for memoizing but what you can also do is just create an instance variable called auth client and then say it or equals begin and then just pass it a whole block here and some formatters like having the end at the very end i don't but okay so what this will do now is say each time we reference auth client in a single request we're going to be using the same instance of an auth client so before we go too far this request thing this is from sinatra in rails it's params we're gonna say params code that'll pull out the authorization code in the second step of the oauth 2 flow or the third step and then we'll call fetch access token this is where we exchange that auth code for an access token on the server with our secret keys and such and that will allow us to create an instance or store the access token that'll allow us to interact with the api on behalf of the channel and then it's you know nailing out the client secret so we don't accidentally keep passing around the client secrets and then uh storing this the the auth client the entire auth client in the session credentials rather than doing this i think we actually want to store this um store the auth client creds in the db um and then and then redirect sure redirect to okay so in order to store it in the db we need a we need a model for this so let's create another a new rails model called let's call it a youtube session rails g model youtube session and it'll have let's give it a a session id or session token maybe and then this will be something that we automatically generate and we use that to authenticate with whomever is logged in um and then let's also give it just like a credentials cred and chills json blob okay all right um duplicate key in dictionary ruby oh my vimarcy okay ah let's see what is okay so i try to disable this fixer and it's prettier prettier is just like taking over all right let's see create youtube sessions let's take a look at what happened all right so we got a json blob for credentials and we have our session token null false and then we'll index on that session token um okay sure rake uh db migrate this will create our new youtube sessions model i'm sorry a table in the database that is related to the new youtube sessions model now we can go back to our youtube sessions controller and here we want to say youtube let's see youtube session.create and we'll pass in the credentials is auth client.json or maybe just off client i think i don't know if we need to explicitly serialize it to json or if that'll happen for us by default um okay so one other thing that we need to change here is this call to clientsecrets.load because recall that like we're not actually going to use that clientsecrets.json file they gave us instead we're going to call new and pass in um a big object which represents or like that looks exactly like that clientsecrets.json file so um all right copying something that looks just like it and pasting it in here um okay so the project id is what is our project id uh dashboard okay so this is our project id okay this is the auth token uri token uri all this stuff is included in that json blob that you you that gets spit out and then the redirect uri is just going to be redirect uri and then we're going to pull this client id out of the rails application credentials that's encrypted and then this client secret is encrypted in the in the application credentials so let's go look at how to set up some credentials with rails so you say you specify the editor command or the editor that you want to use uh explicitly as like an environment variable and then you can run rails credentials colon edit to open up the credentials editor and we're going to say youtube and then client id and client secret here and the client id and client secret are available in that developer console where we were here so this is the client secret and this is the client id copy those two all right and then once we close this file it gets encrypted as uh config credentials.yaml.enc so if we cat that file it's just an encrypted file and it's encrypted with your config slash master.key i'm not going to show you that um but yeah keep that in mind because when you deploy to production your master key should never be committed to git but instead you'll pass that or you'll set it as an environment variable when you deploy okay so by by virtue of having that yaml file that has youtube and underneath it client id and client secret we're able to access those those credentials directly with rails using rails.application.credentials and then.dig is just a way to like reach into a hash with several keys in a row but this should give us back our client id and our client secret and plop them in the right spots and uh yeah so i mean technically you can put your project id there too but it doesn't whatever it doesn't really matter um okay so let's let's uh we've gone like a super far aways uh here let's take a let's take a swag and see if we can get this thing to fire up and actually work so we'll start the rails server oh you know what there's one other thing we need to do so for some reason this the google gem doesn't actually require these libraries for you so we need to require them explicitly at the top so we need the youtube api and we need this client secrets thing um do we even need youtube we don't need the youtube api here yet okay all right so we've got our server running let's go to localhost 3000 and actually we want to slash youtube sessions new uh no youtube sessions slash new uh what did i call it youtube sessions all right so now we're gonna choose an account choose your brand or whatever in case we're going to pick a brand and then it says google hasn't verified this app it's because we haven't actually like gone through the whole verification process that's okay you can click continue it tells you what video automations is asking for which permissions it's asking for and then you can say allow and now this should uh okay allow again it should redirect us back to our rails app and uh no violation no session token okay cool we're so close holy smokes all right so we'll go to our youtube session sessions model um before validation on create do self dot session token or equals secure random.hex let's see if we have secure random i think it might just be i think it might just be there all right let's see refresh okay so we got to go through the flow again because we already like use that grant whatever all right connect connect oh we're back okay so let's see if that worked it looks like stuff got inserted into the database this is fantastic i love it okay very cool so we are now connected and we have some credentials so what i want to do now is say rails console and we should be able to use these credentials to make a request so the the way that we can make a request is we have to follow this pattern here so client options we're going to be able to pull out of the database which we just created and then we need to create a new auth client then we need to create a youtube service and then we can list the channels on the youtube service with that auth client so these are kind of the four steps so let's start with client options um actually i wonder if we can just like use our youtube session.last.credentials and plop those directly into here um oh gosh we have to require this thing again google api client client secrets maybe um couldn't convert it to a string so is it json.parse uh couldn't convert it to a hash okay so let's just take a look at the credentials here all right and to json um uh let's see could not convert hash into string is this right client options json.parse um okay so hmm should this be client secrets that load i wonder json.parse that converts them into a hash and stores them in client options and then it's passing signet oauth client two okay so let's go take a look at how this is actually implemented um and here i think this is the um oath client two and we should be able to initialize with options as a hash so why isn't that why is that failing um so we got our creds and our credits have an authorization uri uh update bang so update bang options uh oh it you know what it looks like these need to be maybe symbols or something because it's it's like accessing them as if they were symbols so maybe this needs to be like um to json and then let's see json.parse and then symbolize keys true or symbolize names true uh okay and let's see if that works so creds nope cannot convert hash into string so i think we need to like dig into um into this so um all right how do we want to do this um wait deep hash normalize what is this where does that come from um okay so that should symbolize everything all right so yeah we're gonna need to step through this um so real let's see let's open the gem file and add buy bug pry rails and gem buy bug so that we can have a debugger to walk through this right and let's just run um rail c require buy bug and then we want our no nope so our creds is going to be youtube session.last.credentials and then then we want to call what is it again signet oauth2 client.new threads okay require the google api client secrets again and then we pass in creds um can't convert hash to string undefined method each for string okay so in deep hash normalize on 1193 over here something is failing on 1193 oh that's not a thing okay so um how do we okay so all right so um i don't know if that's actually going to work all right let's let's see if we can just like use seeds.db or something like that or one of these files here to try to test this a little bit so creds is equal to youtube session.first.credent trolls and then we want to do this thing and then we want to require google api and we also want to require buy bug and we'll say um we'll drop in by bug there now if we say rake db seed this will run that seed file and it will give us a context so that if we go like this we should see creds maybe nope um what's our exception undefined method each for huh why is it failing that fast hmm okay there's a weird thing where like if if you're looking at the last statement of the method with by bug it it like exits faster than that so why isn't it letting me jump to the next statement i don't know let's just add another buy bug here i wonder if this is uh something about buy bug let's see creds okay so we've got we got some creds and we want to say signet o auth 2 client.new creds to json okay this should be exactly what's happening in um in uh this code the in the in the example code i don't know why this isn't uh isn't working okay so this should just be creds i think we want to step into this method here to the initialize method so we can see what's going on all right so we've got all these things none of those matter okay so i'm using n to go next and now it's about to call the update bang method with options so i can look at options by just typing options and then i want to say step again because i want to step into the update method and see if it's crashing just during deep normalize and it looks like that was okay so these are all fine let's see okay so it looks like when we got to redirect uri this is where it might be bailing out um yeah i think we're just coming we're coming back up to uh to exit here so redirect uri might be missing um from from the actual thing so real c let's see uh youtube session.last.creds credentials um and is there a redirect uri in here at the authorization uri um dot sort and there is a redirect uri and that looks right-ish uh but maybe it needs to be stored as like a as a string or something um or maybe it's expecting it as a string and we're saving it as the json blob for the for the object for that object type um so let's let's uh let's take a look at what was happening over in this flow again one more time so when it's storing it into the session uh so it is calling dot two json on that i wonder if this two json call is uh doing something that is a little different than what we're doing when we're calling uh when we're just dropping in the auth client like this let's see what happens here so if we restart this and then come back over here refresh uh youtube sessions we're redirected we go through the flow all over again because now we want or we're going to get a new we're going to get a new youtube session i think we should see youtube session.last oh gosh the credentials are yeah okay whatever but if we look at the redirect uri it is stored not as a hash but as a string so i think that might be what we want maybe not let's see well rails see let's go to our seed file again let's use the new thing that we just did and we'll say json.parse rake db seed i think what we want to do is we want to convert to json and then we want to convert back into an object that we can store as json that's the same format that's expected here so let's see okay cool so that that that totally worked um all right so let's yeah let's do that so let's go to our youtube sessions controller this needs to be dot to json but then we'll say like json.parse so we're like serializing and then deserializing so that that one object which i think is of type like authorized url or like uh addressable uri um it's being stored as a hash with all the different properties rather than being stored as a string so by calling to json on the auth client i'm expecting that they probably reimplemented to json to like make sure that everything gets jsonified let's actually check it out so like in here to json yeah see look at this they've got their own custom to json method which was messing around with a couple of these uris see look at this this is it right here redirect uri.2s so um this is a little frustrating but whatever like we've we've got it figured out so it's like we just need to convert it to json or like serialize to json and then serialize back out into a hash store that as json and then i think we can work with it a little better so let's see if that works so we want to say youtube sessions again and we'll go through the flow going through the flow and okay so we've got we've got one more youtube session now let's just jump right into rails console and require this client secrets thing and then let's do sorry i'm jumping around a ton here okay so let's try to create the auth client now and we're going to use youtube session.last.credentials nice okay so it's not crashing and burning and now we should be able to say youtube create a new youtube service ah so this is where we probably need this youtube thing nice all right now we want to pass in this or create channel no part ah part what is the part uh part was defined where part was not defined anywhere what is this variable oh gosh okay list channels i'm guessing this is supposed to be all right so i think the code snippet is bad that's fine let's go look and see if we can figure it out based on the um on the actual library uh github where's github oh gosh here we go uh okay let's actually just look at the api docs so we're trying to do what is this trying to do list chat actually let's just say like youtube.methods.sort we're going to put youtube.methods.org this will show you like all the methods that are available i like to do minusclass.new.methods this will just like strip out all the normal class or like all the normal methods from any instance of a class so here we see like all the actual stuff that matters um so let's do list videos so youtube.list videos and see what happens okay expected an argument so if we say list here and um did they give us examples in ruby does not look like it by video id by okay my most liked videos what is part okay so part is a string let's see the part parameter specifies a comma separated list of one or more video resource properties so the following list contains the part names that you want so let's just say id let's see if we can say that hey permission denied uh okay so then we probably also need to specify the authorization and based on this i think maybe we want something like this um but again the code snippet was wrong so i don't know how far this will go missing required parameter um okay 400 wow that message is so hard to read okay google okay expected one of my rated chart id param or id so no filter selected do so a filter must be a required thing yeah so specify exactly one of the following parameters id my reading or chart hmm is this actually what we want uh i thought we would be able to list them just by like maybe channel id or something uh let's see so yeah get it get the videos by okay maybe this isn't what we want let's see channels list list my channel okay so going back to youtube. what is it list channel and the first thing is a part and let's just say id and the second thing is options undefined method list channel i thought that was a thing let's see list channels those channels okay expected one of these no filter selected is this where we have to say uh mine oops invalid value mine yeah okay so how does this stuff work execute let's just see show the code show me it in ruby please there is no ruby let's take a look at python uh gosh channels.list it's completely different all right that's pretty cool um wow this is tough okay i think we're close we're super close we can totally get this what the heck how do you all right maybe we need to look into um the youtube v3 what is yeah so what was the class again that we newed up for the instance of youtube let's go try to find this thing again on google on github sorry sitegithub.com here let's see so this person trying to create a new broadcast do to do and part is snippets they insert okay that's different um create new service okay that's not it all right so whatever it's somewhere in here right and the class we want is a youtube service so you can type t you can just type a t anywhere on github and you can start typing and it'll fuzzy find the objects or the the file paths for you super handy all right so we've got this initialized thing we've got um let's see videos list videos it takes a part a chart the id locale okay fields quota user options my rating all right so list list channels part category id mine yeah my maybe mine is supposed to be true let's see in the doc strings here yeah it's okay so it's a boolean so i passed um i passed the string mine but this is probably supposed to be just true hey we got something back epic very epic super cool all right so this proves that the authentication is officially working so what did we do again we uh we went to the gem file we added this google api client then we went through this whole process of setting up the youtube sessions controller which has a several methods it has to require this weird thing at the top has a new route which is using the auth client that we're going to create down here and redirecting to that authorization url that brings you to google where you walk through the flow to authenticate and give permission to access your account and then once you've given permission you're redirected back to this callback route where we're extracting the authorization code from the uri fetching the access token then we can store the uh the auth client that we have the access token for in a new object in the database and we had to do this this funky dance where we convert the auth client to json and then parse the json so that we can use that effectively with the the youtube v3 client and then again recall that we did this like this funky dance here with um with the google api client secrets because we're not loading from client secrets.json instead we're just passing in the hash and pulling out our credentials out of the encrypted credentials that rails provides we're converting the client secrets into an auth client we're updating it with a bunch of stuff so that we can access it offline and do incremental auth and then we can we went over to the routes and we added a couple new routes for getting youtube sessions i think i might change this to just be like the normal conventional resources or like resource youtube session so you just go to youtube session and then um the callback can just be like slash edit or something this is kind of awkward but uh was required so that we could set up the redirect uri we also went through the whole flow in the dashboard to set up our oauth client so thanks for following along and sticking with me i hope that was useful uh in the next session what we'll do is um we will fetch all of our youtube videos and then create those in the database and store them in the database so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time --- [Back to all 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