A Web UI frontend for YouTube-DL

This is a small project that creates a simple and easy to use user interface for downloading content with YouTube-DL (or yt-dlp).

How it looks

Landing page

Downloading

What it offers

• A default option to download a video
• A second drop down option for audio only
• Downloads all content in highest resolution/quality
• Log file to see what IP, Browser, OS and Video was downloaded
• The support for all YouTube-DL compatible websites

How to use

After setting up Apache, I recommend the following steps for getting the program working. All this was tested on Debian 11.

1. Install PHP

sudo apt update && sudo apt install php

2. Install YouTube-DLP (yt-dlp)

sudo curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dl

3. Install yt-dlp dependencies. We use gallery-dl for instagram videos, I found it works a bit better

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gallery-dl ffmpeg atomicparsley

4. Move the project to a location on your webserver. In this case, I am moving it to /public/yt-dl which will allow users to acces it at www.example.com/yt-dl

git clone https://github.com/wailord284/YouTube-DL-WebUI
mv YouTube-DL-WebUI /var/www/example.com/public/yt-dl

5. Grant permissions. Your webserver may require permissions to run these files

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/public/yt-dl

6. Make a temp directory for videos and the log file

• Find videoDIR within the ytdl.sh file. Change this to any location you want for the videos to be downloaded
• Find logDIR within the ytdl.sh file. Change this to a location for a log file to be stored
• Find $video_path within the video_download.php file. Change this to the same location as ytdl.sh videoDIR
• Find $script_path within the video_download.php file. Change this to the location you put the project (yt-dl in the above example)
• Finally, create a log file and directory where you just specified. Change the permissions the same way we did previously

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data videos
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ytlog.txt

7. Optional - Create a cronjob to clear old videos every week

• In this example, replace /home/alex/videos/* with the location of your video directory
• If you are prompted to choose a text editor, Nano is the easiest option. Pressing Control + X will let you save and exit

sudo apt update && sudo apt install cron
sudo systemctl enable --now cron
sudo crontab -e
@weekly rm -r /home/alex/videos/*

8. Optional - Create cronjob to update yt-dlp every week

sudo crontab -e
@weekly yt-dlp --update

9. Optional - Edit PHP options

• If you download longer videos, PHP execution time may not be long enough. You may also need additional RAM
• In Debian 11, this file is located here: /etc/php/7.4/apache2/php.ini
  • Change max_execution_time = 30 to max_execution_time = 300
  • Change memory_limit = 128M to memory_limit = 1024M

Config Examples

Cron

video_download.php config

ytdl.sh config