YouTube Sub List

A simple web app which aggregates videos from YouTube channels via RSS, no account needed.

Run

The easiest way to get started is to run PHPs built-in webserver. PHP 8.4 is required.

PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=$(nproc) php -S localhost:8008 -t public

There is also a Docker container:

docker build -t youtube-subscriptions .
docker run \
    --name youtube-subscriptions \
    -e PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=$(nproc) \
    -d \
    -p 8008:80 \
    -v $PWD/channels.txt:/var/www/html/channels.txt \
    -v $PWD/videos.json:/var/www/html/videos.json \
    youtube-subscriptions

Channel Subscriptions

The list of subscribed channels is defined in a channels.txt file in the root directory. It should look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/@username0
https://www.youtube.com/@username1
https://www.youtube.com/@username2

To mark a channel as 'featured' prepend a * to the start of the line:

https://www.youtube.com/@username0
*https://www.youtube.com/@favourite
https://www.youtube.com/@username2

Limitations

The YouTube RSS feeds only include the 15 latest videos. The app will persist all videos that are fetched into videos.json but this means that some might get missed if a channel releases more than 15 videos between refreshes.

In the future I might create a background task which fetches the videos every hour so nothing gets missed.