Google YouTube API - Python

Google provides various APIs that allow developers to create apps that interact with different Google services. One of such APIs is the YouTube API which provides developers with programmatic access to YouTube's video and channel information, playlists, and other features.

In this article, we will discuss how to work with the YouTube API using Python.

Getting Started

To get started with the YouTube API, you need to have a Google account and create a project on the Google Developers Console. Follow the below steps:

1. Create a project on the Google Developers Console.
2. Enable the YouTube API for your project.
3. Create credentials for the API. Select "Service account key" and choose JSON as the key type. Save the JSON file to your working directory.

Installing Required Libraries

Before we can start working with the YouTube API in Python, we need to install the required libraries. We can do so using pip.

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

Authorization

To access the YouTube API, we need to authorize our application with the appropriate scopes. Add the following code to your Python script:

import os
import google_auth_oauthlib.flow
import googleapiclient.discovery
import googleapiclient.errors
from google.oauth2 import service_account

scopes = ["https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly"]
credentials = None

# Load JSON credentials file
credentials_path = "<path-to-credentials>.json"
if os.path.exists(credentials_path):
    credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(
        credentials_path, scopes=scopes)

Note: Replace <path-to-credentials> with the actual path to your JSON credentials file.

Making API Requests

Now that we have authorized our application, we can start making requests to the YouTube API. Below is an example of how to get the details of a specific YouTube channel:

def get_channel_details(youtube, **kwargs):
    request = youtube.channels().list(**kwargs)
    response = request.execute()

    for item in response.get("items", []):
        print("Title: {}".format(item["snippet"]["title"]))
        print("Description: {}".format(item["snippet"]["description"]))
        print("Published At: {}".format(item["snippet"]["publishedAt"]))
        print("\n")
    
# Build the YouTube API client
youtube = googleapiclient.discovery.build("youtube", "v3", credentials=credentials)

# Call the function to get details of a specific channel
get_channel_details(youtube, part="snippet", id="<channel-id>")

Note: Replace <channel-id> with the actual ID of the channel you want to get details for.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to work with the YouTube API using Python. We covered the steps to get started with the API, installing the required libraries, authorizing our application, and making API requests to get details of a specific YouTube channel.