YouTube Channel Scraper

Scrapes videos from a YouTube channel using Python.

It takes a YouTube channel URL as an input and produces a list of videos as an output.

Video attributes:

• url
• title
• description
• author
• published_at
• thumbnail

Requirements

Install chromedriver at /chromedriver. For more details refer to scripts/install_chromedriver.sh.

Alternatively you can use the library inside a Docker container. This way you don't need to manually install the chromedriver. Have a look at Usage with Docker.

Install

pip install youtube-channel-scraper

Usage

from youtube_channel_scraper.scraper import YoutubeScraper

scraper = YoutubeScraper(channel_url)
crawled_videos = scraper.scrape()

Optional parameters

• stop_id: stop scraping when this video ID is encountered. Older videos are always scraped first.
• max_videos: maximum amount of videos to scrape
• proxy_ip: proxy IP with port

CLI usage

youtube-channel-scraper "https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID"

Available arguments

positional arguments:
  channel_url           Youtube channel URL

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --filename FILENAME   Output file
  --stop_video_id STOP_VIDEO_ID
                        Youtube video ID that indicates to stop crawling
  --max_videos MAX_VIDEOS
                        Max videos to crawl
  --proxy PROXY         Proxy IP
  --screenshot_filename SCREENSHOT_FILENAME
                        Path to exceptions screenshot

Usage with Docker

Why?

When running youtube-channel-scraper in a Docker container there is no need to manually install chrome driver in your environment.

How?

git clone https://github.com/hajkr/youtube-channel-scraper.git
cd youtube_channel_scraper

# Run the container and build it when running for the first time
make run

# Enter the container
make to_container

python youtube_channel_scraper "https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID"