YouTube — Postli docs

Home / Docs / YouTube

Provider

YouTube

Upload videos and Shorts to a YouTube channel through the YouTube Data API v3. Postli supports title, description, tags, category, privacy, made-for-kids declaration, and scheduled publish.

Requirements

A Google account with a YouTube channel created (a channel is required — a Google account alone is not enough).
The channel’s upload limit must not be locked — brand-new accounts may be limited to 15-minute uploads until phone verification.

Spec

Account type

Personal or Brand YouTube channel

Auth

Google OAuth 2.0

Token type

1-hour access token + refresh token (Postli refreshes automatically)

Post types

Video upload, Short (vertical ≤60 s)

Title

Up to 100 characters

Description

Up to 5,000 characters

Connect your YouTube channel

Postli manages the OAuth app centrally — you don’t need to create a Google Cloud project or paste any API credentials. Go to Integrations → YouTube → Connect and choose the Google account that owns your YouTube channel. If your account has multiple Brand channels, pick which one to connect.

Scopes Postli requests:

https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.upload # upload videos https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly # channel info, stats https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube # manage own videos https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email # identify connected user

Post types in detail

Video

Standard upload — title, description, tags, category, thumbnail. Postli uploads via Google’s resumable upload protocol so even multi-GB files survive flaky connections.

Short

A YouTube Short is just a video that meets the format rules: vertical 9:16, 60 seconds or shorter, with #Shorts in title or description. Postli auto-appends the hashtag if you tick the “Publish as Short” toggle on the YouTube channel tab.

Scheduling

Two layers of scheduling:

Postli schedule — the time at which Postli calls the upload API.
YouTube schedule — uploaded as Private with a publishAt timestamp; YouTube flips it to public at that moment. Use this when you want a video uploaded and processed well before its public release.

Auto-comments

YouTube’s comment-write endpoint requires the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.force-ssl scope and is gated by Google’s API access review for content-owner accounts. Postli does not currently request this scope; auto-comments are therefore disabled for YouTube. Engagement reads (views, likes, comments count) work normally.

Rate limits & quota

YouTube Data API v3 uses a 10,000 quota-units / day per project system, and uploading a single video costs ~1,600 units. In practice, this caps a single Google API project at roughly 6 uploads per day per account. Postli’s production project quota is provisioned for production traffic; queued uploads back off if the per-channel daily upload cap is hit.

Daily upload cap. YouTube also enforces a per-channel cap (usually 100 videos / day for verified channels). Postli respects this and defers excess uploads.

Gotchas & best practices

15-minute limit on unverified accounts. Verify your phone in YouTube Studio before connecting if you plan to upload longer videos.
Brand channel selection. A Google account can manage multiple Brand channels — if you don’t see the right one in the post composer, reconnect and pick the correct channel.
Made for kids. The COPPA “Made for kids” flag is mandatory at upload time. Postli defaults to No; override per post if needed.
Thumbnail upload requires phone verification on the channel.
Shorts hashtag. Without #Shorts, even a vertical 60-second video may be classified as a regular video by YouTube.

Webhooks

Postli does not subscribe to YouTube webhooks (Push Notifications). Engagement is polled.