riptube 0.1.1

YouTube video downloader with best quality

riptube

📺 Download YouTube videos and extract audio with one command 🎵

Installation · Usage · Options

Overview

A CLI tool for downloading YouTube videos and extracting audio tracks. Built on top of yt-dlp, it handles the complexities of video downloading with automatic format selection, audio extraction, and cookie support for restricted content.

Features

• Best quality by default - Automatically selects the highest available video and audio quality
• Audio extraction - Extract audio tracks as MP3 files with a single flag
• Cookie support - Access age-restricted or private videos using browser cookies
• Clean filenames - Automatic sanitization of video titles for safe file names

Installation

pipx install riptube

Development install with uv

uv tool install . --editable

The package is published on PyPI as riptube, and the installed command is riptube.

If you want to use it as a Python package instead of the CLI:

pip install riptube

import riptube
from riptube import download_video

print(riptube.__version__)
download_video("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ")

Dependencies

Dependency	Required	Purpose
FFmpeg	Yes	Video/audio processing and merging
aria2	No	Faster downloads (optional)

macOS:

brew install ffmpeg aria2

Linux:

sudo apt install ffmpeg aria2

Windows: Download FFmpeg from ffmpeg.org

Usage

Download a video

riptube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Specify output file

riptube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ -o video.mp4

Extract audio only

riptube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ -a

Use cookies for restricted videos

riptube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ -c cookies.txt

Options

Option	Description
-o, --output	Output file path (default: auto-generated from video title)
-a, --audio	Extract audio track as MP3
-c, --cookies	Path to Netscape format cookies.txt file

Development

# Clone and install in development mode
git clone https://github.com/tsilva/riptube.git
cd riptube
uv tool install . --editable

# Or install with pipx
pipx install . --force

# Run directly without installing
python -m riptube.cli <url>

Releases

Use the Make targets to cut a release from a clean main branch:

make release-patch
make release-minor
make release-major

Each target bumps the version, refreshes uv.lock, commits the release change, and pushes to main. That push triggers the release workflow, which builds the package, publishes it to PyPI, and then creates the matching GitHub release. The workflow can also be re-run manually from GitHub via workflow_dispatch.

License

MIT