Using Podsync to convert YouTube channels to podcasts

tl;dr: commit that do the job and link to @Pravonapoplavu as podcast

Why?

I recently discovered that one of my favorite YouTube show @Pravonapoplavu does not publish new episodes on podcast platforms anymore.

So I decided to convert the YouTube channel to a podcast format using the Podsync tool.

It was very easy to do (except hosting, dns and ssl and debugging), and I will walk you through the steps I took to do it.

Few notes before we start

Podsync is a tool which converts youtube channels into podcast feeds. It allows you to listen to your favorite YouTube channels on any podcast app.

How it works in a nutshell:

1. Run as a background job
2. Fetches YouTube channels and playlists via YouTube Data API
3. Download new videos via youtube-dl
4. Generate Podcast feed and place audio files in the right order
5. Serves static content

1. Setup docker image

from mxpv/podsync:latest

run pip uninstall yt-dlp
run pip install yt-dlp

copy podsync.toml /app/config.toml

Why do we need custom image and re-install yt-dlp? Because of this bug

2. Setup podsync config

The main poinst here are:

• YouTube Data API key which you can find here (you need to create a project and access to the YouTube Data API)
• opml = true which will generate OPML file for you

Of course it will be great to have a custom domain, persistent storage but it’s not required.

If you need any customizations, see example config.

[server]
port = 8080
# Bind a specific IP addresses for server ,"*": bind all IP addresses which is default option, localhost or 127.0.0.1  bind a single IPv4 address
bind_address = "*"
hostname = "https://your_hostname.com"

[storage]
  [storage.local]
  data_dir = "/data/podsync/"

[tokens]
youtube = "PASTE YOUR API KEY HERE"

[feeds]
    [feeds.poplava]
    url = "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwCkRo2WQx_9JRWISLC47fw"
    page_size = 2
    format = "audio"
    opml = true

3. Run it via docker-compose

version: "3.8"

volumes:
  podsync_data:

services:
  # https://github.com/mxpv/podsync
  podsync:
    container_name: podsync
    restart: unless-stopped
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile.podsync
    volumes:
      - podsync_data:/data

Test and verify locally before deploying to production.

docker-compose up

It should be available on http://localhost:8080 and contain the poplava folder with .mp3 files in it and poplava.xml file which can be passed to the podcast app. I’m using https://overcast.fm and it works great.

Fin

Now you need to deploy it to the server in order to access URL from the internet, but it’s out of scope of this article, however, I’m using Traefik Proxy and Linode for it. You can explore my infra here and here is commit which do the steps above.

In my case, final link looks like this: https://podsync.katsick.cloud/poplava.xml