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Welcome to just-yt

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Learn what just-yt does, what it does not do, and how the documentation will take you from a first request to a reliable application.

just-yt is a TypeScript library for reading public information from YouTube. It can search, inspect videos and channels, read published captions as transcripts, and return autocomplete suggestions.

You do not need a Google Cloud project or a YouTube Data API key. The library talks to Innertube, the internal service used by YouTube’s own clients, and turns its changing responses into ordinary, typed JavaScript objects.

Explore the SDK

Choose the kind of public YouTube data you want to work with. Each card opens a focused guide with examples, options, and the reasons you might use them.

SearchFind videos, channels, and playlists with familiar filters.VideosRead stable metadata from a video ID or URL.TranscriptsTurn published captions into complete text or timed segments.ChannelsInspect public channel identity, counts, artwork, and links.

Who this guide is for

This guide starts from the beginning. You should be able to follow it if you know how to open a terminal and edit a TypeScript file. When a new idea appears, we explain why it exists before showing its options.

If you already have an application, you can jump to a feature page or the API reference. The chapters are still arranged in a useful reading order:

  1. Start Here installs the package and makes one request.
  2. Core Concepts explains the client, sessions, concurrency, pagination, and errors.
  3. Features covers each kind of public data separately.
  4. Configuration adds options only when there is a reason to use them.
  5. Advanced introduces the Effect-native API.

What you can build

Common projects include a small research script, a channel dashboard, a search index, a transcript analysis tool, or a server that adds public YouTube details to its own records.

The Promise API is the best place to begin:

import { YouTube } from 'just-yt';

const yt = new YouTube();
const video = await yt.video('jNQXAC9IVRw');

console.log(video.title); // Me at the zoo

The result is a normal object. There is no special response wrapper to learn.

The boundary to remember

Innertube is undocumented and YouTube can change it. just-yt isolates those changes behind typed models and clear errors, but no anonymous client can promise that every video will always be available.

Your next step

Continue to installation. It checks the small amount of setup you need and explains what each install command does.