Php Youtube Api Laravel Package

URL parsing that keeps up with how Youtube links are actually shared today, and a way to page through a channel's playlists. Additive only, so this is a drop-in upgrade from 1.3.0, with one narrow behaviour change noted under Changed.

Added

• parseVIdFromURL() now understands Shorts URLs (youtube.com/shorts/xxxx). Reported in #79 by [@malbero](https://github.com/malbero).
• parseVIdFromURL() now understands two further path forms: youtube.com/live/xxxx, which is what live streams and the VODs they leave behind are shared as, and the legacy embed URL youtube.com/v/xxxx, which is still present in a lot of older content. Both accept a query string and a trailing slash, and both work with or without www and with or without a scheme, exactly as /embed/ and /shorts/ already did. Requested in #85.
• getPlaylistsByChannelIdAdvanced($params, $pageInfo = false), which takes raw playlists.list parameters and can return the pagination envelope alongside the results. getPlaylistsByChannelId() returned one page and gave the caller no way to read nextPageToken, so a channel with more playlists than a single page holds was silently truncated; passing a pageToken through $params and reading the next one back from info now walks the whole channel. getPlaylistsByChannelId() is unchanged for existing callers and is now a thin wrapper over the new method, the same way getPlaylistItemsByPlaylistId() wraps its own ...Advanced() counterpart. Originally proposed in #71 by [@tyteck](https://github.com/tyteck).

Changed

• getPlaylistsByChannelId() now rejects a null channel id before making a request, throwing InvalidArgumentException the way the other ...Advanced() methods already do for their required ids. Previously the null was passed through as an empty channelId parameter and the request was sent anyway, so the caller paid a quota unit to have the API reject it. Any other value, including the empty string, reaches the API exactly as before. Callers that catch \Exception are unaffected, since InvalidArgumentException extends it.

Fixed

• parseVIdFromURL() discarded the video id whenever a path-style URL carried a query string, because the ?v= branch assigned null unconditionally when no v parameter was present. youtube.com/embed/xxxx?start=30 and youtube.com/shorts/xxxx?feature=share both threw "The supplied URL does not look like a Youtube URL". A ?v= parameter still takes precedence when one is actually present. Also from #79.
• /embed/ was matched anywhere in the URL rather than at the start of the path, so the id was parsed from the wrong offset for URLs that merely contained the word. Both /embed/ and /shorts/ are now matched as path prefixes, and only the first path segment is taken as the id, so a trailing slash is no longer included in the returned id.
• A short URL written with a trailing slash, youtu.be/xxxx/, returned the id with the slash still attached (xxxx/), which then produced 404s from the API for anyone passing the result straight through. The youtu.be branch took the whole path rather than its first segment; it now follows the same rule as the path-prefix forms. Reported alongside #85.

Full changelog: https://github.com/madcoda/php-youtube-api/compare/v1.3.0...v1.4.0

Support for current PHP, with the PHP 7.0 floor kept intact. There are no public API removals, so this is a drop-in upgrade from 1.2.x.

Published retroactively. The v1.3.0 tag was pushed on 2026-07-27 and has been installable via Composer since then — only this releases-page entry was missing.

Added

• Support for PHP 8.0 through 8.5. The library is now tested on all of 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5.
• Madcoda\Youtube\Http\HttpClientInterface and CurlHttpClient, so the transport can be replaced. Youtube::setHttpClient() and Youtube::getHttpClient() expose it. This is what lets the test suite run without a network connection or an API key.
• Laravel package auto-discovery. The provider and the Youtube alias are registered automatically on Laravel 5.5 and newer.
• GitHub Actions CI across the full supported matrix, plus PHPStan (level 5) and PSR-12 checks.
• tests/tools/record-fixtures.php, which re-records every fixture from live responses in one command, and a fixture-drift test that fails when a fixture records a field the API has stopped returning. Together these stop the offline suite from silently asserting against a shape Youtube no longer produces.
• ext-json is now declared. The library has always used json_decode().

Fixed

• Fatal on PHP 8: decodeSingle() passed the decoded body straight to property_exists(). A response that is not JSON (an HTML error page, an empty body, a truncated read) decodes to null, which is a TypeError on PHP 8. PHP 7 only raised a warning and returned false. Any caller on PHP 8 hit a hard crash whenever the API returned a non-JSON response.
• Fatal on PHP 8: passing a truthy non-array $optionalParams to getChannelByName(), getChannelById(), getChannelsById(), getPlaylistsByChannelId() or getActivitiesByChannelId() reached array_merge() and raised a TypeError. Such values are now ignored.
• decodeList() read pageInfo, kind, etag and items without checking them, producing five warnings per failed decode on PHP 8.
• page_info is now reset on every decode. A failed decode previously left the caller reading pagination data from the previous, successful request.
• parse_str() was given parse_url()'s null when a URL had no query string, deprecated on PHP 8.1+. This fired for every /embed/ URL.
• parseVIdFromURL() used strpos() as a boolean, so a URL starting with youtube.com or youtu.be produced offset 0 and was rejected as invalid. Scheme-less URLs such as youtu.be/xxxx and youtube.com/watch?v=xxxx are now parsed correctly.
• The $sslPath constructor argument was stored but never used as a path: CURLOPT_CAINFO and CURLOPT_CAPATH were both hardcoded to the CA bundle vendored in src/cert, silently replacing the system trust store with a 2013-vintage snapshot, and CURLOPT_CAPATH was given a file where it expects a directory. The supplied path is now honoured, and a path that does not exist raises InvalidArgumentException at construction instead of quietly using the wrong certificates.
• An endpoint that already carried a query string had new parameters appended with no separator, so .../videos?part=id plus key=K became .../videos?part=idkey=K. Reachable by anyone overriding $APIs or the apis config key.
• 18 [@return](https://github.com/return) docblocks were wrong. getVideosInfo(), searchVideos(), searchChannelVideos() and getChannelsById() were all documented as returning \StdClass when they return arrays, and neither decodeSingle() nor decodeList() documented that they can return false.
• The Laravel 5 provider declared protected $defer = true, which Laravel has ignored since 5.8 replaced it with the DeferrableProvider interface.
• The Laravel 5 provider now merges its shipped config defaults. Previously, if the config had not been published, the binding failed with "the configuration options must be an array" rather than reporting the missing API key.
• The Laravel 5 provider guards its config_path() call, which does not exist on Lumen and made boot() fatal there.

Changed

• The test suite no longer requires an API key or network access. It runs against recorded fixtures captured from real API responses. The tests that talk to the real API are kept in a separate live group, excluded by default, and run on a schedule in CI.
• Test subjects were replaced with durable ones and centralised in tests/Subjects.php. The previous suite used whatever was to hand in 2013: one of its videos has since been deleted outright, and two others turned out to live on unofficial re-upload channels rather than the rights holders'. Playlist tests now use a channel's uploads playlist, which cannot be deleted while the channel exists, instead of a curated playlist that can.
• Code style moved from PSR-2 to PSR-12, enforced by PHP-CS-Fixer instead of StyleCI. Class constants keep no visibility modifier, because public const is PHP 7.1+ syntax and would not parse on the 7.0 floor.
• composer.lock is no longer committed. A library should not ship one, and it pinned the dev toolchain to PHPUnit 5.7 for everyone.

Removed

• src/compat.php. It claimed to alias the pre-PSR-4 Madcoda\Youtube class, but was actually named Madcoda\compat and aliased nothing. It has been dead since the PSR-4 move in 2016 and was loaded on every autoload dump.
• .travis.yml. travis-ci.org shut down in 2021.

Deprecated

• YoutubeServiceProviderLaravel4. Laravel 4 has been end of life since 2015, and the provider calls package() and bindShared(), both removed in Laravel 5, so it cannot work on any supported framework version. It will be removed in 2.0.
• src/cert/cacert.pem. This CA bundle is no longer referenced by the library and its contents date from 2013. It will be removed in 2.0; rely on the system trust store, or pass an explicit path to the constructor.

Full changelog: https://github.com/madcoda/php-youtube-api/blob/v1.3.0/CHANGELOG.md

Merged

#76 Fixed a PHP Warning

Merge #73

Fix Laravel 5 integration

fix namespace error

• Add getChannelsById

Thanks @JavierMartinz and @peter279k

PSR-4 autoload

add Laravel 4 and 5 support classes, you can set the api key in the config file!

Various patches from the community

Various bug fixes and new functions contributed by the community

Stable basic wrapper