A command line scraper written in Python 2.7 using scrapy and lxml. Scrapes your YouTube History into a searchable SQLite database, so you can search for something you've previously watched. Allowing search by video length, date published, video description, video title, etc. Uses pre logged in session cookies extracted from chrome.

This is just an experimental project. The database design isn't well thought out and there are not implemented methods for getting information back out of the database.

• scrapy
  • pywin32 aka win32api Required for scrapy on windows.
• lxml
• sqlalchemy

pip install scrapy lxml sqlalchemy

Windows users: You will need to install pywin32 manually; i.e. follow the link and get the installer.

You'll need a session cookie from your web broweser, so the scraper can use your account to get your history.

• Install the browser extension editThisCookie.

• Using the same browser, goto Youtube.com and ensure you are logged in.

• Click the "editThisCookie" button, then click export. The cookies are now on you clipboard.

• Create the file "youtube_cookies.json" in this directory, then paste and save.

• Open chrome / chromium

• Make sure your logged into youtube.com

• Open the inspector (F12)

• Open the network tab, check the "Preserve History" box

• Visit https://youtube.com/feed/history

• Click the request for "/feed/history" in the network tab

• Copy the section "Request Headers", below the title "Request Headers"

• Paste into a new file called "youtube_request_headers.txt" in this directory

• In the settings.py file comment the "COOKIES_JSON" line and uncomment the "CHROME_HEADERS_FILE" line.

scrapy crawl yth_spider

You can search it manually in your favorite database browser See DB Browser for SQLite. This way you can see the results in a table and use SQL statements to search it.

Or use ipython and sqlalchemy, this example outputs all videos > 7 minutes in length:

from db_api import *
db = AppDatabase()
with db._session_scope() as s:
	h_entries = s.query(HistoryEntry).filter(HistoryEntry.time > 7 * 60).limit(5)
for he in h_entries.all():                                            
	print "{t} (http://youtube.com/watch?v={v})".format(t=he.title, v=he.vid) 

The db_api module is just a wrapper around a sqlalchemy model and session. db._session_scope() gives you a sqlalchemy session you can run queries on, as shown above.

From the settings.py file just remove the line:

'youtube_history.pipelines.DbOutputPipeline': 901,