Running youtube-dl on Android via Termux

By chimo on (updated on )

I recently got youtube-dl working on LineageOS nightly via Termux. Here are the steps I took:

  1. In Termux, install some of the tools we’ll need:
    packages install python wget vim
  2. Create a “bin” folder in the home directory: mkdir bin
  3. Add the directory to your path at login: vim .bashrc
    export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
  4. Exit and re-launch Termux to update your path: exit
  5. Download youtube-dl: wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O bin/youtube-dl
  6. Make it executable: chmod u+x bin/youtube-dl
  7. Change the interpreter path in the youtube-dl file: vim -b bin/youtube-dl
    #!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/env python
  8. Try it! youtube-dl [URL]