YouTube Current Data MCP

Read-only MCP bridge for current YouTube metadata, captions, channels, recent uploads, and search. It is deliberately a small proof of concept for the path:

ChatGPT -> MCP -> YouTube -> structured data -> ChatGPT

The bridge uses the official YouTube Data API v3 when possible, the public channel Atom feed for recent uploads, and clearly marked yt-dlp fallbacks for public transcripts and no-key operation.

Published container

GitHub Actions tests the project and publishes a public multi-architecture image for AMD64 and ARM64:

ghcr.io/dracoform/chatgpt-youtube-mcp:latest

Versioned releases use Git tags such as v0.1.0 and publish the corresponding 0.1.0 and 0.1 image tags. After the first workflow run, the package visibility must be changed to Public once in the GitHub package settings; repository visibility and package visibility are separate settings.

Related MCP server: youtube-mcp

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
# Add YOUTUBE_API_KEY to .env for official metadata/channel/search calls.
docker compose up --build -d

The Streamable HTTP endpoint is http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp.

For a Python development environment:

uv sync
uv run python -m unittest discover -s tests -v
uv run python scripts/live_smoke.py 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID'
uv run youtube-current-data-mcp

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/INTERFACE.md, and docs/CHATGPT_SETUP.md.

For a guided Portainer Web Editor stack, use either generators/generate_docker-compose_for_ChatGPT_MCP.sh on Bash or generators/generate_docker-compose_for_ChatGPT_MCP.ps1 on PowerShell. Both scripts only generate YAML; they install and start nothing. See docs/PORTAINER_STACK_GENERATORS.md.

Security boundary

• Every MCP tool is annotated read-only and idempotent.

• There are no post, comment, subscribe, delete, upload, or account-modification tools.

• API keys remain server-side environment variables and are never returned.

• Arbitrary URLs are rejected; only recognized YouTube URL shapes are accepted.

• Tool output and transcript size are bounded.

Deliberate PoC limits

• Google OAuth for personal subscriptions is not included in v0.1. It needs a real per-user authorization broker, not a token pasted into the model.

• Transcript retrieval for third-party videos is necessarily unofficial. YouTube Data API v3 only permits caption download when the caller can edit the video.

• A public plugin submission needs a stable public HTTPS deployment. Developer-mode testing can use OpenAI Secure MCP Tunnel instead.