Deploy and Host TubeArchivist on Railway

Self-hosted YouTube media archive server — save, organize, and search your YouTube collection. TubeArchivist downloads videos with metadata, subtitles, and comments, then indexes everything in Elasticsearch for fast full-text search, all behind a clean responsive web UI.

About Hosting TubeArchivist

This Railway template deploys the full TubeArchivist stack: the Django + Celery + nginx main app, Elasticsearch 8.19 for search and metadata indexing, Redis 7.4 for the task queue, and a POT-token provider companion that keeps yt-dlp downloads working from datacenter IPs where YouTube's bot checks would otherwise stall them. All services talk over Railway private networking, and media persists on the main service's 50GB volume. First start takes a few minutes while Elasticsearch initializes its index; after that, log in with the generated credentials and add channels or video URLs to start archiving.

Why Deploy TubeArchivist on Railway?

Own your archive — videos land on your own persistent volume, immune to channel deletions, region blocks, or YouTube account loss.
Full-text search — Elasticsearch indexes titles, descriptions, subtitles, and comments across your whole library.
Automated downloading — subscribe to channels and playlists; new uploads are fetched automatically (or on-demand for single videos).
Bot-detection resistant — ships with a built-in POT-token provider companion so yt-dlp downloads don't stall on YouTube's "confirm you're not a bot" checks on datacenter IPs.

Common Use Cases

Personal YouTube archiving: mirror channels and playlists you follow
Offline media server: play archived videos from any browser
Research and content-preservation projects requiring searchable archives
Automated channel monitoring with scheduled rescans and downloads

Dependencies for TubeArchivist Hosting

You can configure the deployment using the following environment variables (all internal wiring is pre-configured by the template):

Variable	Description	Default
`TA_USERNAME`	Initial admin username	`tubearchivist`
`TA_PASSWORD`	Initial admin password (auto-generated)	generated
`ELASTIC_PASSWORD`	Elasticsearch password (shared with ES service)	generated
`TA_HOST`	Public URL of this service	auto-set from Railway domain
`ES_URL`	Elasticsearch connection URL	auto-set from ES companion
`REDIS_CON`	Redis connection URL	auto-set from Redis companion
`POT_PROVIDER_URL`	POT-token provider for yt-dlp	auto-set from POT companion
`TA_MEDIA_DIR`	Media directory inside the volume	`/cache/youtube`
`TA_AUTO_UPDATE_YTDLP`	Auto-update yt-dlp (`release`/`nightly`/`disabled`)	`release`
`TZ`	Timezone (IANA name)	`UTC`

Deployment Dependencies

This template deploys four services:

tubearchivist — main app (Django + Celery + nginx), 50GB persistent volume at /cache
tubearchivist-es — Elasticsearch 8.19 (search + metadata index), volume at /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
tubearchivist-redis — Redis 7.4 (task queue + cache), volume at /data
tubearchivist-pot — POT-token provider (bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider) that keeps yt-dlp downloads working from datacenter IPs

Upstream project: tubearchivist/tubearchivist
POT provider: brainicism/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider

Credentials (TA_PASSWORD, ELASTIC_PASSWORD) are auto-generated per deploy and shared between the main app and Elasticsearch via template references — no manual wiring needed.

Implementation Details

In Railway, after deploying the template:

Log in with the generated TA_USERNAME/TA_PASSWORD
Import a YouTube cookie in Settings → Applications if downloads hit bot detection even with the POT provider active (datacenter IPs sometimes require both)
For heavy archiving, monitor disk usage in the Railway dashboard and increase the volume size as needed

Features

Archive YouTube videos, channels, and playlists with metadata + subtitles
Full-text search via Elasticsearch
Automatic channel/playlist subscription monitoring
Tagging, download queue, and playlist management
Mobile-responsive web interface
Built-in POT-token provider keeps downloads working on datacenter IPs

License

GPLv3 — TubeArchivist License