← Back to YouTube CLI

About YouTube CLI

YouTube CLI is a high-performance, open-source command-line tool and agent interface designed for searching and scraping YouTube content—including videos, shorts, live streams, channels, playlists, and subtitle transcripts. Maintained under the SpaceCorps open-source engineering collective, the project delivers a standalone binary capable of operating seamlessly across macOS, Linux, and Windows with zero runtime dependencies or interpreter overhead.

Project Mission & Origins

The original prototype CLI was created as a .NET global tool (Youtube.Console) by Niels Bosma to facilitate YouTube extraction via Apify. To empower modern automated deployment pipelines, agent tool-calling loops, and terminal workflows, SpaceCorps re-engineered the tool in native Rust 2024. The rewrite slashes startup latency from managed runtime overhead down to sub-3ms native execution, eliminates runtime dependencies, and implements multi-account OS keystore integration.

Architectural Principles

YouTube CLI is built around speed, agent determinism, and credential safety:

• Native Speed & Zero Runtime Bloat: Compiled directly to static machine code with blocking HTTP (ureq + rustls), avoiding async runtime startup overhead.
• Hardware Keystore Storage: Secrets never touch disk files unencrypted by default; credentials are delegated to macOS Keychain, Windows DPAPI, or Linux Secret Service.
• Agentic Output Protocol: Clean, human-readable YAML by default for terminal users, raw structured JSON via --json for LLM tool loops, and deterministic error exit codes.

Apify Integration

YouTube CLI interfaces directly with Apify's robust streamers~youtube-scraper actor, giving developers and AI agents reliable access to YouTube search indexes, metadata extraction, and subtitle captioning without fragile local headless browser scraping.