TubeArchivist

TubeArchivist is an open-source, self-hosted YouTube archival platform that gives you full control over your video collection. It downloads videos via yt-dlp, indexes them with Elasticsearch for full-text search, and serves them through a clean web player — no reliance on YouTube's availability, algorithm, or content moderation decisions. With over 14,000 GitHub stars, it is the most widely deployed self-hosted YouTube archiver available.

Common Use Cases

Researchers and journalists use TubeArchivist to preserve video evidence before it is removed from YouTube, maintaining a searchable archive of primary source material. Educators subscribe to lecture channels and curate offline libraries for students in low-bandwidth environments. Media enthusiasts replace YouTube Premium with a self-hosted library of subscribed channels, playing video ad-free and without tracking. Developers and power users integrate TubeArchivist with their existing Jellyfin or Plex setup using the companion plugin, unifying YouTube content with their wider media library.

Key Features

• Channel subscriptions with scheduled automatic downloads via yt-dlp
• Full-text Elasticsearch search across titles, descriptions, subtitles, and comments
• Built-in web video player with watch history and per-video progress tracking
• SponsorBlock integration to skip sponsors, intros, outros, and self-promotion
• Subtitle download and indexing for keyword search within spoken content
• Optional comment archival preserving community context with each video
• Playlist management and per-channel download settings
• User role management with multiple account support
• Jellyfin and Plex companion plugins for media server integration
• Browser extension for one-click download queuing from YouTube
• Apprise notification support for new downloads and system events
• Backup and restore functionality for the Elasticsearch index

Why deploy TubeArchivist on Hostinger VPS

Running TubeArchivist on a Hostinger VPS gives you persistent storage and always-on downloading — videos are archived continuously in the background without keeping your personal computer running. A VPS provides the dedicated RAM that Elasticsearch requires (minimum 2 GB, ideally 4 GB for larger archives) and the disk space to grow a long-term video library. Because your archive is on a server you control, it is unaffected by YouTube content removals, regional restrictions, or account bans, and it remains accessible to all devices on your network without a subscription.