An automated, headless YouTube Watcher and Scraper

Authors: Christian C., Moritz M., Luca S.
Related Projects: YouTube Uploader, Twitch Compilation Creator, Neural Networks

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About

Searches YouTube, queries recommended videos and watches them. All fully automated and anonymised through the Tor network. The project consists of two independently usable components, the YouTube automation written in Python and the dockerized Tor Browser.

This project is for educational purposes only. Using Tor to watch YouTube videos is strongly discouraged, especially for Botting purposes. Please inform yourself about the Tor network, before using it extensively.

Setup

YouTube Automation

This project requires Poetry to install the required dependencies. Check out this link to install Poetry on your operating system.

Make sure you have installed Python 3.8! Otherwise Step 3 will let you know that you have no compatible Python version installed.

1. Clone/Download this repository
2. Navigate to the root of the repository
3. Run poetry install to create a virtual environment with Poetry
4. Either run the dockerized Browser with docker-compose up, install geckodriver for a local Firefox or ChromeDriver for Chromium. Ensure that geckodriver/ChromeDriver are in a location in your $PATH.
5. Run poetry run python main.py to run the program. Alternatively you can run poetry shell followed by python main.py. By default this connects to the dockerized Browser. To automate a different Browser use the --browser [chrome/firefox] command line option.

Dockerized Tor Browser

Running the Container requires Docker and docker-compose.

1. Clone/Download this repository

2. Navigate to the root of the repository

3. Run docker-compose up. The image will be built automatically before startup.

4. Selenium can now connect to the browser via port 4444. In Python the connection can be established with the following command.

   driver = webdriver.Remote(
       command_executor="http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub",
       desired_capabilities=options,
   )

   See main.py for more information.

Run Parameters

All of these parameters are optional and a default value will be used if they are not defined. You can also get these definitions by running main.py --help

usage: main.py [-h] [-B {docker,chrome,firefox}] [-t] [--disable-tor] -s SEARCH_TERMS [-c CHANNEL_URL]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -B {docker,chrome,firefox}, --browser {docker,chrome,firefox}
                        Select the driver/browser to use for executing the script.
  -t, --enable-tor      Enables Tor usage by connecting to a proxy on localhost:9050. Only usable with the docker
                        executor.
  --disable-tor         Disables the Tor proxy.
  -s SEARCH_TERMS, --search-terms SEARCH_TERMS
                        This argument declares a list of search terms which get viewed.
  -c CHANNEL_URL, --channel-url CHANNEL_URL
                        Channel URL if not declared it uses Golden Gorillas channel URL as default.