(Local Cron) Automating youtube video to anchor fm audio

Older codespaces workflow is still available on the main branch

Table of Content

• (Local Cron) Automating youtube video to anchor fm audio
  • Prerequisite
  • Setting up automation
    • (Once) Set up Github Credentials
    • (Everytime) Creating a new podcast
      • On Github.com
      • On your local machine
    • Setting up the cron job
      • Playlist
      • Setup Workflow
      • Setup Cron
      • Edit Cron Job Timing
    • See Your Actions
    • Rerun failed Actions
  • Manual Method
  • How is the converted videos data stored ?
  • Concern regarding automation of playlists

Prerequisite

For the script to run successfully it is necessary for there to be at least one episode manually published on Anchor.fm. The steps to publish on a brand new Anchor.fm account are different and will break the automation.

1. Make sure you have node, npm and git installed on your machine.

    node --version && npm --version && git --version

Setting up automation

(Once) Set up Github Credentials

If you are not using any GCM (Git Credential Manager) which already has Personal Access Token to authenticate you with Github, do the following steps. Otherwise, skip.

1. Install Homebrew
2. Install Github CLI
3. Make gh your credential manager

      gh auth setup-git
   

4. Run the following to setup credentials. For help gh auth login

      gh auth login

5. (For Mac) Please install gnu-sed and create an alias in bash profile.
   • Install gnu-sed

   brew install gnu-sed
   

(Everytime) Creating a new podcast

On Github.com

1. On Github
   1. Create new branch from local-cron and name it like podcast_1.
2. Go to secrets and create ANCHOR_EMAIL_1 and ANCHOR_PASSWORD_1.

   The _x naming format are important to match branch to podcast credentials.

On your local machine

1. Open a terminal

2. If first time, on your local machine create a folder and navigate into the folder before proceeding, as this is where all subsequent podcast branches should be placed.

   1. mkdir podcasts && cd podcasts/

3. Clone the podcast_x branch to podcasts/ folder in your local machine and change into the podcast_x folder.

     git clone -b <podcast_x> <repository_url> <podcast_x>

   eg. replace <podcast_x> with your new podcast branch eg. podcast_2
   replace <repository_url> with your repository url eg. https://github.com/username/repo.git

   git clone -b podcast_2 https://github.com/username/repo.git podcast_2

4. Change into the new podcast_x directory.

Setting up the cron job

Playlist

1. To attach a Playlist URL to this branch ( this will be used in all subsequent runs )

     ./scripts/prompt-url.sh

Setup Workflow

1. To update the github action to match Anchor password and email. ( On Mac, make sure that gnu-sed is installed and aliased )

     ./scripts/update-workflow.sh

Setup Cron

1. To set the job to run at a specific time.
   1. To cron the job

        ./scripts/cron-it.sh

   2. The job runs every Thursday at 12 pm your machine's local time, the machine needs to be powered on at this hour. To change the timings see next section.

Edit Cron Job Timing

1. At times, you would want to edit the cronjob, use crontab -e and edit it. Cronguru can help you in figuring out the format used in timing a job.

2. To check if the cron job is set, you can list it using

    crontab -l

See Your Actions

1. On Github go to a podcast branch and under Actions tab you check status of your workflows.

Rerun failed Actions

1. On your local machine using terminal, navigate into a branch, eg. podcast_1
2. Run the following command

./scripts/rerun-failed.sh

Manual Method

The manual method is still available from main branch and using a codespace, same as before. If it is ever needed.

How is the converted videos data stored ?

For first run the convertedVideos.json file should have the following keys.

{
    "name": "Upload processed data",
    "videoQuantity": 0,
    "lastUpdated": "",
    "videos": []
}

• The video information is stored in the key videos as array of video IDs

Concern regarding automation of playlists

NOTE: Automation depends on this npm package to fetch playlist related information without use of an API key.

Warning: There might be concerns regarding violation of Github TOS when it comes to uploading of a playlist. Read more here

Manual Effort: At times some fields don't get populated on AnchorFM (eg. title being untitled), this is dependent on Github Action and will need manual intervention.

Limitation: Github allows for 2000 min of action usage per month. Once you run out of these get an account or wait for next month.