Create RSS Feed for YouTube Search Results

December 12, 2017

Based upon the Twitter RSS Feed, a Maryland based Rails developers has created a Google Script that creates a RSS feed of YouTube videos matching your search terms. You pass the search phrase as a parameter to the Google Script web app and it uses the ContentService to serve the results as an RSS feed.

Before authorizing the code, go to the Google Developers console and enable the YouTube Data API for your Apps Script project. You may also be required to create credentials before using the YouTube API in Apps Script. Publish the script as web app and set access to anyone, even anonymous.

/*
  YouTube RSS Feeds
  Written by @user1535152 http://stackoverflow.com/q/30486682/512127
  Based on http://www.labnol.org/internet/twitter-rss-feed/28149/
*/

function doGet(e) {
  var title = 'Youtube RSS Feed for ' + e.parameter.search,
    timez = Session.getScriptTimeZone(),
    search = encodeURIComponent(e.parameter.search),
    link = 'https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=' + search,
    self = ScriptApp.getService().getUrl() + '?' + search;

  var rss = '';
  rss += '';
  rss += '' + title + '';
  rss += '' + link + '';
  rss += '';
  rss += '' + title + ' updated on ' + new Date() + '.';

  var results = YouTube.Search.list('id, snippet', {
    q: search,
    maxResults: 50,
    order: 'date',
  });

  for (var i = 0; i < results.items.length; i++) {
    var item = results.items[i];
    rss += '';
    rss += '' + item.snippet.title + '';
    rss += 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' + item.id.videoId + '';
    rss += '' + item.snippet.description + '';
    rss += '' + Utilities.formatDate(new Date(item.snippet.publishedAt), timez, 'EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z') + '';
    rss += 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' + item.id.videoId + '';
    rss += '';
  }

  rss += '';

  return ContentService.createTextOutput(rss).setMimeType(ContentService.MimeType.RSS);
}

Google Apps Script YouTube

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Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory