Set It and Forget It: Automating YouTube Uploads

Ever found yourself spending hours manually uploading videos to YouTube? I recently faced this challenge and built a simple automation pipeline using YouTube’s API. Here’s how you can do it too!

Getting Started with the YouTube API

First, you’ll need to set up authentication credentials:

Create Your OAuth Client ID
- Head over to the Google API Console
- Create a new project (call it whatever you like)
- Navigate to “Credentials”
- Click “Create OAuth Client ID”
- Follow the setup wizard and download your credentials file (this will be named client_secret.json)
- Return to Credentials → OAuth 2.0 Client IDs
- Set the application type as “Desktop App” and give it a name
- This client_secret.json file is your key to accessing all API services

Install the Required Libraries

Get everything you need with pip:

pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib google-auth

Prepare Your Upload Script
- Check out Google’s official guide
- Create a client_secret.json file in the same format as shown in Google’s examples
- If you’re using Python 3 (which you should be!), edit the print statements and exception handling in Google’s sample code
- Remove any references to httplib (it’s deprecated in Python 3)
- Install the OAuth2 client library:
```
pip install oauth2client
```
- Run your script to test everything works

Taking Automation to the Next Level

Now for the fun part—full automation:

Create a dedicated folder for videos you want to upload
Place your Python upload script in the same folder
Create a scheduler script that runs your uploader at regular intervals (I use cron for this)

With this setup, you can simply drop videos into your folder, and they’ll automatically be uploaded to YouTube on your schedule. No more tedious manual uploading!

Have you automated any other parts of your content workflow? I’d love to hear about your solutions in the comments.