Download YouTube videos with yt-dlp

Install yt-dlp-dl

Grab the binary for your platform and download in a folder that’s part of your path.

For example:

sudo wget https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp /usr/local/bin

Change ownership:

chown $USER:$USER yt-dlp

Make it executable:

chmod +x yt-dlp

Verify installation

Run:

yt-dlp

If you get the error: /usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory, run:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python

Test installation

yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4

That should download the video into whatever folder you ran the above command from.

(Optional) Create config file

touch ~/yt-dlp.conf

You can use --ignore-config if you want to disable using the config file for a particular youtube-dl run.

Recipes

Default output template

%(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s

You can view list of available fields here.

Download single video to current folder

yt-dlp <video-url>

Download entire playlist to current folder

yt-dlp <playlist-url>

Download MP3 of video / playlist

yt-dlp <video-or-playlist-url> -x --audio-format mp3

Tip: You can make your playlist unlisted to make it easier to download with yt-dlp without having to pass your account credentials.