Minimalistic and lightweight self-hosted private YouTube synchronizer built on top of yt-dlp
About
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Motivation
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Installation
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Architecture
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Development
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License
About
Yarrtube is a self-hosted service that watches tracked YouTube playlists and channels and automatically downloads new videos as they're published.
Yarrtube is designed to run on your NAS via Docker alongside the rest of your media stack (Plex, Jellyfin, etc.), but it runs on any laptop too.
Main Features
- Track YouTube public playlists.
- Track entire channels and download new videos when they are published!
- Minimalistic webapp to see the videos from the browser in both desktop and mobile.
- Support for Plex, Kodi and Jellyfin. See the Plex guide.
Motivation
This is a personal project. I'm an experienced software engineer coming back from a ~10-month sabbatical, and I wanted a real project to get my hands dirty again, both with writing code and with AI-assisted coding. I wanted to build something that I would actually use, and that would be useful to others too. Yarrtube is the result. If you are a recruiter/dev you can take a look at the architecture.
It also solves an actual problem at home: I wanted a reliable, ad-free and no-algorithm way to watch specific channels and playlists in Plex, especially for my kids. Yarrtube keeps the playlists and channels I care about mirrored to disk, so they just show up in Plex. No ads and no algorithm.
It doesn't aim to compete with anything. If you want a full-featured archiver, projects like TubeArchivist do far more. Yarrtube is small on purpose.