ViewTube

ViewTube is an alternative YouTube frontend.

It can recommend, play and search for videos. It saves your watch progress and you can subscribe to channels for them to appear in your subscription feed.

It's built using Nuxt.js and Nest.

View Demo View Github

Features

  • Watch videos without ads or tracking
  • Built from the ground up to be mobile and desktop friendly
  • Dark and light themes
  • Touch friendly video player with gestures
  • Supports loop, speed, autoplay and volume
  • Create an account separately from Youtube
  • Read comments
  • Search for videos
  • Watch playlists
  • Subscribe to channels and see their latest uploads
  • Receive push notifications for subscribed channels
  • Integrated SponsorBlock support

Where does ViewTube get the data from?

ViewTube does not use the official Youtube API. It instead scrapes the data from the website using a combination of custom built tools and the following open source libraries.

The Invidious API is still used in a few places.
You can check the progress on replacing the invidious api here.

Screenshots

Homepage

Screenshot-Homepage

Video

Screenshot-Video

Channel

Screenshot-Channel

Host it yourself

A more comprehensive installation guide is available in the wiki

Docker

Example docker command

$ docker create \
  --name=viewtube
  -p 8066:8066
  -v /path/to/data:/data \
  -e VIEWTUBE_API_URL=http://your-ip-or-domain.com/api/
  --restart unless-stopped \
  mauriceo/viewtube:latest

Docker-compose

version: '3'

services:
  viewtube:
    container_name: viewtube
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: mauriceo/viewtube:latest
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ./data:/data
    environment:
      - VIEWTUBE_API_URL=http://your-ip-or-domain.com/api/
    ports:
      - 8066:8066

Development setup

Prerequisites

  • Nodejs v16.x
  • Yarn 1.22.x
  • MongoDB 4.4.x
  • Redis 6.x

Instructions

  1. Clone this repo

    git clone https://github.com/ViewTube/viewtube-vue

  2. Install dependencies

    yarn install

  3. Start the dev server

    yarn serve

    If you want to start the api and frontend separately, you can use the following commands.
    yarn serve:api
    yarn serve:web

  4. Visit localhost:8066 with a browser

Pull requests welcome!