Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
Take a look at the example `docker-compose.yml` file provided. Tube Archivist depends on three main components split up into separate docker containers:
- The environment variables `HOST_UID` and `HOST_GID` allows Tube Archivist to `chown` the video files to the main host system user instead of the container user.
1. Go through the **settings** page and look at the available options. Particularly set *Download Format* to your desired video quality before downloading. **Tube Archivist** downloads the best available quality by default.
3. On the **downloads** page, click on *Rescan subscriptions* to add videos from the subscribed channels to your Download queue or click on *Add to download queue* to manually add Video IDs, links, channels or playlists.
So far this depends on the video you are trying to import to be still available on YouTube to get the metadata. Add the files you like to import to the */cache/import* folder. Then start the process from the settings page *Manual media files import*. Make sure to follow one of the two methods below.
- This will **consume** the files you put into the import folder: Files will get converted to mp4 if needed (this might take a long time...) and moved to the archive, *.json* files will get deleted upon completion to avoid having duplicates on the next run.
From the settings page you can backup your metadata into a zip file. The file will get stored at *cache/backup* and will contain the necessary files to restore the Elasticsearch index formatted **nd-json** files as well a complete export of the index in a set of conventional **json** files.
If you see a message similar to `AccessDeniedException[/usr/share/elasticsearch/data/nodes]` when initially starting elasticsearch, that means the container is not allowed to write files to the volume.
That's most likely the case when you run `docker-compose` as an unprivileged user. To fix that issue, shutdown the container and on your host machine run:
```
chown 1000:0 /path/to/mount/point
```
This will match the permissions with the **UID** and **GID** of elasticsearch within the container and should fix the issue.
You will see the current version number of **Tube Archivist** in the footer of the interface so you can compare it with the latest release to make sure you are running the *latest and greatest*.
* There can be breaking changes between updates, particularly as the application grows, new environment variables or settings might be required. Any breaking changes will be marked in the **release notes**.
* All testing is done with the Elasticsearch version number as mentioned in the provided *docker-compose.yml* file. Running an older version of Elasticsearch is most likely not going to result in any issues, but it's still recommended to run the same version as mentioned.
- Every limitation of **yt-dlp** will also be present in Tube Archivist. If **yt-dlp** can't download or extract a video for any reason, Tube Archivist won't be able to either.
