YouTube Transcript

A small Flask web app that fetches English subtitles/transcripts for a YouTube video and displays them in the browser.

The sole purpose of this project is to make it easy for an end user to:

1. Paste a YouTube link
2. Click a button
3. Copy a clean, human‑readable transcript

This is especially useful for feeding transcripts into LLMs for summarization, analysis, or note‑taking.

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TL;DR / Quickstart

1. Create a RapidAPI account
   • Sign up at https://rapidapi.com
2. Subscribe to this exact API (free plan is sufficient)
   • 👉 https://rapidapi.com/ytjar/api/yt-api
   • The free tier currently allows 300 requests per month
3. Create a RapidAPI App
   • RapidAPI will generate an API key for that app
4. Create a .env file with the values below
5. Run the app (locally or with Docker)

That’s it — no direct YouTube API credentials required.

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Current status

Main branch:
This app uses one provider only: the yt-api RapidAPI provider.
While the code could be refactored to support additional providers, only this RapidAPI integration is wired in on main.

This project originally attempted to call YouTube APIs directly. That approach works locally, but once deployed to a server or datacenter IP, requests were blocked. Using RapidAPI avoids those IP‑based restrictions and provides a reliable hosted endpoint.

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What it does

• Accepts a YouTube URL:
  • youtube.com/watch?v=…
  • m.youtube.com
  • youtu.be/…
• Queries the RapidAPI yt-api endpoint for subtitle metadata
• Selects an English subtitle track (SRV1 format)
• Downloads and parses the XML transcript
• Renders a single, clean block of readable text
• Displays remaining request quota information

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Tech stack

• Python
• Flask
• requests for HTTP calls
• gunicorn for production serving
• Docker + docker‑compose for deployment

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RapidAPI requirements (important)

You must do the following:

1. Have a RapidAPI account
2. Subscribe to yt-api:
   • https://rapidapi.com/ytjar/api/yt-api
3. Create a RapidAPI App
4. Use the App’s API key in this project

Without this, the app will not work.

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Configuration

Create a .env file (or set environment variables) with these exact values:

RAPIDAPI_HOST="yt-api.p.rapidapi.com"
YT_API_RAPIDAPI_URL="https://yt-api.p.rapidapi.com/subtitles"
RAPIDAPI_KEY="your_rapidapi_app_key_here"

Environment variable details

Variable	Description
RAPIDAPI_HOST	Must be yt-api.p.rapidapi.com
YT_API_RAPIDAPI_URL	Subtitles endpoint used by the app
RAPIDAPI_KEY	API key from your RapidAPI App

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Run locally (no Docker)

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Then open:

http://localhost:5000

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Run with Docker (local build)

Build the image:

docker build -t youtube-transcript-app .

Run it:

docker run --rm -p 5000:5000 --env-file .env youtube-transcript-app

Open:

http://localhost:5000

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Run with docker‑compose (recommended for servers)

The repository includes a docker-compose.yml file.

docker compose up -d

This expects:

• a .env file in the same directory
• the RapidAPI variables defined above

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Deployment notes (Docker Hub + server pull)

A common deployment flow:

1. Build the image locally
2. Tag it
3. Push to your registry (e.g. Docker Hub)
4. Pull and restart on your server

Example:

docker build -t youtube-transcript-app .
docker tag youtube-transcript-app turc1656/youtube-transcript:latest
docker push turc1656/youtube-transcript:latest

Ensure docker-compose.yml references the same image tag.

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Optional: deployment webhook

This repo includes deploy_script.py, which can trigger a server‑side webhook to pull the latest image and restart the container.

Required environment variables

Variable	Description
DEPLOYMENT_WEBHOOK_URL	Server endpoint that performs the deploy
DEPLOYMENT_SECRET_TOKEN	Shared secret validated by the server

Run:

python deploy_script.py

Security note

The current script sends the token as a query parameter (?token=...).
For better security in production, consider:

• Sending the token in a request header
• Validating it server‑side before deploying

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.