YouTube API & PHP - Get video details (google-api-php-client)

Guides in this series:

Intro

In this guide we’ll talk about retrieving the details of a video from the YouTube data API using PHP.

Prerequisites:

A project set up in the Google Cloud console
The package google-api-php-client.

For full details on setting up the above prerequisites, check out my first part of this series: YouTube API & PHP - Initial setup.

After following the instructions in that video, you’ll have the following code which is the example we’ll build upon:

<?php

# You can omit requiring Composer’s autoload file if you're working in a framework (e.g. Laravel) that sets up autoloading for you
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Google\Client;
use Google\Service\YouTube;

# Configs
$apiKey = 'YOUR_API_KEY';

# Initialize YouTube API client
$client = new Client();
$client->setDeveloperKey($apiKey);
$service = new YouTube($client);

# Example query just to make sure we can connect to the API
$response = $service->videos->listVideos('snippet', ['id' => 'fG08dcJ8xFE']);

# Output the response to confirm it worked
dump($response);

# If you don’t have access to a dump function, replace the above `dump` with PHP’s built-in `var_dump` function

From this code, we want to focus on this line:

$response = $service->videos->listVideos('snippet', ['id' => 'fG08dcJ8xFE']);

This lines uses the videos.list method which you can read about in the YouTube data API docs: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos/list.

Required parameter 1: part

The first required parameter for the list videos method is the part. The part parameter expects a comma-separated list of one or more video resource properties that the API response will include.

Part options include:

contentDetails
fileDetails
id
liveStreamingDetails
localizations
player
processingDetails
recordingDetails
snippet
statistics
status
suggestions
topicDetails

In our example, the part we request is snippet which returns us the following information:

channelId
title
description
tags
categoryId

You can specify multiple parts by providing a comma separated string. Example retrieving the parts snippet and statistics:

$response = $service->videos->listVideos(
    'snippet,statistics',
    ['id' => 'fG08dcJ8xFE']
);

Required parameter 2: filter

The next required parameter is a filter that specifies which video(s) you want to receive. Options here include:

chart (e.g. mostPopular)
id (of a specific video)
myRating (Set to like or dislike). This filter requires an OAuth connection which we’ll set up in future videos.

In our example, we filtered by id:

$response = $service->videos->listVideos(
    'snippet', 
    ['id' => 'fG08dcJ8xFE']
);

Optional parameters

After the two required parameters, there are a series of optional parameters that can influence your query. You can read more about these parameters in the docs.

Here’s an example with the addition of the maxResults optional parameter:

$response = $service->videos->listVideos(
    'snippet', 
    ['chart' => 'mostPopular', 'maxResults' => 50]
);

Output the response

Because our query is designed to return a single video, we can update our code to narrow down on that video from the response:

$response = $service->videos->listVideos(
    'snippet', 
    ['id' => 'fG08dcJ8xFE']
);

# Narrow down to the single video within the response
$video = $response->items[0]->snippet;

Then, we can construct some output to show the details of this video:

<h1>Example: Get details for a single video</h1>

<h2>Title</h2>
<?php echo $video->title ?>

<h2>Thumbnail</h2>
<img 
    src='<?php echo $video->thumbnails->high->url ?>' 
    style='width:150px' 
    alt='Thumbnail for the video <?php echo $video->title ?>'>

<h2>Description</h2>
<textarea style='width:700px; height:200px'><?php echo $video->description ?></textarea>

Results: Results of getting the snippet details for a video using the YouTube data API