Yeet

Download videos from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Douyin.

Laravel + Inertia + React. Extraction via yt-dlp.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+
• Postgres
• Node 22+
• yt-dlp and ffmpeg — ffmpeg is required to merge YouTube's separate video/audio streams into mp4, and to transcode mp3

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Setup

make install

Set AWS_* in .env to point at your S3-compatible bucket, and YTDLP_BINARY to the absolute path of yt-dlp (which yt-dlp) — the queue worker may not inherit a PATH containing homebrew.

Running

make start

YouTube cookies (production)

YouTube bot-checks bare datacenter IPs. Without cookies, probe/download fails with:

Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot.

Fix: pass a Netscape cookies file from a logged-in YouTube session via YTDLP_COOKIES. Use a throwaway Google account — not your main login. Read more in the yt-dlp docs.

Export on Mac

Use a Chrome profile with only the throwaway signed in. Quit Chrome (Cmd+Q), then:

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser "chrome:Profile 1" \
  --cookies ~/cookies.txt \
  --skip-download "https://www.youtube.com"

Profiles are under ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/. If the cookie DB is locked, Chrome is still running — kill it and retry.

Install on the server

Put the file on shared storage so it survives deploys (Forge example):

/home/forge/yeet.kierb.com/storage/app/yt-dlp-cookies.txt

scp ~/cookies.txt forge@YOUR_SERVER:/home/forge/yeet.kierb.com/storage/app/yt-dlp-cookies.txt

In .env:

YTDLP_COOKIES=/home/forge/yeet.kierb.com/storage/app/yt-dlp-cookies.txt

Restart PHP and the downloads queue workers so they pick up the env. The path is gitignored locally as storage/app/yt-dlp-cookies.txt — never commit it.

Inspect on the server

php artisan ytdlp:check          # file path, age, each cookie name + expiry (no values)
php artisan ytdlp:check --probe  # also live-probe a public video for streams

Exit non-zero if the file is missing/unreadable, has no YouTube cookies, or --probe gets no_formats / bot-check. Session health keys off __Secure-3PSID / __Secure-1PSID / SID — not short-lived GPS/consent cookies.

When it breaks again

Cookies go stale or YouTube invalidates the session. Re-export from the same throwaway profile, replace the server file, no code change needed. Also keep yt-dlp updated (yt-dlp -U).

Douyin cookies

Douyin needs its own cookie jar. YTDLP_COOKIES is a youtube.com file and yt-dlp only sends cookies matching the request host, so it never reaches Douyin. There's no browser export and no account here — one command writes it:

php artisan ytdlp:douyin

Lands in storage/app/douyin-cookies.txt (override with DOUYIN_COOKIES). Run it once per machine — make install covers local, so this is mainly a one-off on the server. Without it, Douyin downloads throw and the exception names this command.

Re-run with --force if Douyin starts refusing the cookie; it isn't routine upkeep, the cookie's own expiry is a year out. App\Services\DouyinCookies explains what Douyin is actually checking for.