YouTube Studio MCP

A local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for managing YouTube channels from AI tools such as Codex, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients.

YouTube Studio MCP lets your assistant inspect channel performance, review recent uploads, update video metadata, upload thumbnails, post comments, and read analytics through your own Google OAuth credentials.

Demo

User: Show my YouTube channel overview and summarize the last 10 uploaded videos.

Assistant uses:
- youtube_auth_status
- youtube_channel_overview
- youtube_list_videos

Result:
The assistant can review recent uploads, public stats, metadata, privacy status, and improvement opportunities.

See Demo for a setup walkthrough.

Features

• Read authenticated channel profile, statistics, branding, and uploads playlist.
• List recent videos with metadata, privacy status, content details, and public stats.
• Update video title, description, tags, category, default language, and privacy status.
• Upload custom thumbnails from local image files.
• Read channel and per-video YouTube Analytics reports.
• Post and list top-level video comments.
• Runs locally over stdio with no hosted backend.
• Uses only the Python standard library at runtime.

Why this exists

Creators often want AI help with repetitive YouTube Studio work: auditing metadata, improving SEO, comparing video performance, preparing descriptions, and keeping thumbnails/titles consistent. This MCP server gives an AI assistant controlled access to those workflows while keeping credentials on your own machine.

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer.
• A Google account with access to the YouTube channel.
• A Google Cloud project with:
  • YouTube Data API v3 enabled.
  • YouTube Analytics API enabled.
• A Google OAuth Desktop app client JSON.
• An MCP-compatible client.

Quick start

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/i1s-abhishek/youtube-studio-mcp.git
cd youtube-studio-mcp

Create the local secrets folder if it does not exist:

mkdir -p secrets

Download your Google OAuth Desktop client JSON and save it as:

secrets/client_secret.json

Authenticate with Google:

python3 scripts/auth.py auth

Configure your MCP client to run:

python3 scripts/server.py

See Google OAuth Setup and MCP Client Configuration for detailed steps.

MCP configuration

Example stdio config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-studio": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["./scripts/server.py"],
      "cwd": "/absolute/path/to/youtube-studio-mcp",
      "env": {
        "YOUTUBE_CLIENT_SECRETS": "./secrets/client_secret.json",
        "YOUTUBE_TOKEN_FILE": "./secrets/token.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace /absolute/path/to/youtube-studio-mcp with the path where you cloned this repository.

Available tools

See Tools for the full tool list.

Core tools include:

• youtube_channel_overview
• youtube_list_videos
• youtube_get_video
• youtube_update_video
• youtube_upload_thumbnail
• youtube_channel_analytics
• youtube_video_analytics
• youtube_post_comment
• youtube_list_comments

Example prompts

Show my YouTube channel overview and summarize the last 10 uploads.

Review my last 28 days of analytics and suggest what I should improve next.

Update this video's title, description, tags, and language.

Upload this local thumbnail image to video VIDEO_ID.

OAuth scopes

This server requests:

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.force-ssl
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/yt-analytics.readonly

These scopes are broad because the server supports both read and write YouTube Studio actions. Only run this server on machines you trust.

Safety notes

• Do not commit secrets/client_secret.json.
• Do not commit secrets/token.json.
• Review tool calls before allowing metadata updates or comments.
• Keep a backup of important titles, descriptions, and tags before bulk updates.

Verification

Before publishing, this repo was checked to confirm that only secrets/.gitkeep is tracked under secrets/; real OAuth files such as secrets/client_secret.json and secrets/token.json are ignored by git.

Repository topics

Suggested GitHub topics:

mcp, model-context-protocol, youtube, youtube-api, youtube-analytics, youtube-studio, ai-tools, creator-tools, python

Publishing

Maintainers can publish or update the GitHub repository with:

scripts/publish_github.sh i1s-abhishek youtube-studio-mcp

The script creates a public GitHub repo if needed, pushes main, and applies relevant discovery topics.

Sharing

Use Launch Copy when submitting this project to MCP directories or posting it on social platforms.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Security

Please read SECURITY.md before using this with a production channel.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.