Douyin_TikTok_Download_API

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🚀 A self-hosted data API for Douyin and TikTok. One docker compose up, an identity pool that maintains itself, and a REST API, MCP server and web console on top.

💖 Sponsors

These sponsors paid to be here, and Douyin_TikTok_Download_API stays free and open because of it. To sponsor the project, see my GitHub Sponsors page.

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🎬 What it looks like

One real call: paste a link, send it, get the normalised result back. The identity pool, the scheduler and the API reference it passed through on the way are all in the same console. The interface follows the browser's language, and both are written by hand rather than machine-translated. 中文界面

🚀 v4 vs v5

v5 is a rewrite. It started from an empty branch and inherits no v4 code.

v4's real problem was never a shortage of features — it was that the API would die quietly and nobody would know. A cookie expires, a signature algorithm changes, an endpoint gets rate-limited, and you find out when someone files an issue. v5 puts "you can see it" and "it heals itself" ahead of features.

	v4	v5
Where identities come from	You copy cookies out of a browser into config.yaml	A headless browser mints guest identities, and the pool tops itself up when usable ones run low
How requests go out	Straight out, as they arrive	Health tiers, quantised LRU rotation, one in-flight lock per identity, a token bucket per (identity, endpoint), a circuit breaker per endpoint
When something breaks	You wait for a bug report	One structured record per request, live health for every identity and endpoint, visible in the console
Call style	Synchronous — send and wait	Asynchronous by default (202 + task_id); add ?wait= to go back to synchronous
What is kept	Nothing; parsed and discarded	PostgreSQL + Redis. Everything parsed is archived, so a post deleted upstream is still here
Access control	None; anyone can call it	API keys with scopes and roles, managed in the console
Interface	A single PyWebIO page	A React console: identity pool, scheduler, library, downloads, logs, diagnostics
Ways in	REST	REST, MCP and a CLI, all over the same service layer
Signing	X-Bogus, A_Bogus	a_bogus, X-Bogus, X-Gnarly, X-Dynosaur in pure Python, with a browser fallback
Deployment	pip install -r requirements.txt + python start.py	docker compose up, three images
Platforms	Douyin, TikTok, Bilibili	Douyin, TikTok

Bilibili is the one thing that went backwards: v5 does not have it yet. It shares neither the signing nor the identity machinery with Douyin and TikTok, so the rewrite left it out for now.

Still on v4?

v4's code stays on the v4 branch, and the image is still there — pull it by version:

docker pull evil0ctal/douyin_tiktok_download_api:V4.1.2

main is v5 now, and latest follows main. To stay on v4, pin the version tag rather than using latest.

📦 What it can fetch

Capability	Douyin	TikTok
One post (video or image album)	✅	✅
Author profile	✅	✅
An author's posts	✅	✅
An author's liked posts	✅	✅
Mixes / playlists	✅	✅
Comments	✅	✅
Comment replies	✅	✅
Followers	❌	✅
Following	❌	✅

Douyin serves its follower and following lists only to a signed-in session, so those two endpoints are not registered at all: an endpoint that always returns an empty page is worth nothing. Importing your own logged-in cookies widens what the rest can see, too.

Media downloads, the content archive, counter snapshots, collections and a watchlist are built in; none of them needs another service.

🔗 What links it accepts

Paste whatever you have — a short link, a post URL, or the whole caption a platform app puts on your clipboard:

https://v.douyin.com/L4NpDJ6/
https://www.douyin.com/video/7126745726494821640
https://www.douyin.com/jingxuan?modal_id=7660875690212492466
https://www.tiktok.com/@evil0ctal/video/7156033831819037994
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR9nkkmL/
2.84 nqe:/ <caption> https://v.douyin.com/L4FJNR3/ <sentence telling you to open the app>

Short links are followed and a link buried in a caption is extracted. A post id is also checked against the platform's own encoding first, so an id that cannot exist is refused here rather than costing an upstream request.

⚗️ Built with

Service	Python 3.12 · FastAPI · SQLAlchemy 2.0 (async) · Alembic · Typer · structlog
Transport	wreq (browser TLS fingerprint emulation) · httpx
Data	PostgreSQL + TimescaleDB · Redis
Console	React 19 · TypeScript · Vite · TanStack Query · wouter · i18next
Signing	a_bogus, X-Bogus, X-Gnarly and X-Dynosaur in pure Python
Identity minting	CloakBrowser, headless, in a container of its own, called over HTTP
Downloader	Go 1.23, standard library only, statically linked into a scratch image
Auth	argon2id password hashing · API keys with scopes
Protocols	REST (OpenAPI) · MCP (streamable-http) · CLI
Tooling	uv · ruff · mypy · pytest · Docker Compose

Nothing beyond Postgres and Redis is required. No Kafka, no Elasticsearch, no object store, no Kubernetes.

CloakBrowser is pinned to a specific commit. That pin is a security control — see docker/Dockerfile.browser.

🗂 Project layout

Douyin_TikTok_Download_API/
├── src/dtk/                the service; all of it lives here
│   ├── api/                FastAPI routes, auth, OpenAPI localisation
│   ├── platforms/          Douyin and TikTok adapters: endpoints, params, parsers
│   ├── signing/            a_bogus / X-Bogus / X-Gnarly / X-Dynosaur
│   ├── transport/          outbound requests, response classification
│   ├── identity/           identity minting and health
│   ├── scheduler/          identity selection, token buckets, circuit breakers
│   ├── services/           the business layer, shared by REST, MCP and the CLI
│   ├── worker/             async tasks, callbacks, scheduled collection
│   ├── db/                 SQLAlchemy models and Alembic migrations
│   ├── ops/                diagnostics, backups, health checks, alerting
│   ├── media/              downloader client
│   ├── models/             one content model across both platforms
│   ├── urls/               link recognition, short-link expansion, id validation
│   ├── mcp/                MCP server
│   ├── cli/                the dtk command line
│   ├── i18n/               server-side English and Chinese strings
│   └── core/               settings, logging, error types
├── web/                    the React console, built into the app image
│   └── src/
│       ├── pages/          one file per console page
│       ├── components/     design system and shared components
│       └── locales/        console English and Chinese strings
├── docker/                 three Dockerfiles, compose, and two sidecars
│   ├── browser_rpc/        Python, wrapping CloakBrowser
│   ├── downloader/         Go, the media download sidecar
│   └── compose.yml
├── documents/              user documentation, 17 pages in each language
├── tests/                  unit / integration / contract / replay
├── scripts/                smoke.sh
├── .github/workflows/      CI and Docker image publishing
├── alembic.ini
├── pyproject.toml
└── Makefile

⚡️ Quick start

You need Docker and Docker Compose. Nothing in the repository ships a default password or key, so write .env first:

POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 24)
REDIS_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 24)
cat > .env <<EOF
DTK_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 48)
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}
REDIS_PASSWORD=${REDIS_PASSWORD}
DTK_DATABASE_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://dtk:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/dtk
DTK_REDIS_URL=redis://:${REDIS_PASSWORD}@redis:6379/0
EOF

docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml up -d
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml logs api   # prints the setup token

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 and use the token from the log to create the first administrator.

Where the image comes from

By default it is built locally: the first up compiles the application image from the Dockerfile in this repository, which takes a few minutes. To skip that, point compose at the published image instead:

export DTK_IMAGE=evil0ctal/douyin_tiktok_download_api
export DTK_IMAGE_TAG=latest
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml pull
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml up -d

The pull is not optional: these services declare both image and build, so compose builds from the local Dockerfile whenever the image is not already on the machine rather than reaching for a registry.

Images are published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so Apple Silicon and a Raspberry Pi both run natively. The browser container is not published: it installs CloakBrowser from a pinned commit, and that pin is a security control that should be yours to choose, so it stays a local build.

For the browser container, the downloader sidecar, reverse proxies and backups, see docker/README.md.

🖥 What you get

Entry point	Where	What it is
Web console	/	Identity pool, scheduler, library, downloads, logs, diagnostics
API reference	/docs	Swagger UI inside the console, English and Chinese
Bare reference	/swagger, /redoc	No login required
REST API	/api/v1/...	93 operations
MCP	/mcp	Shares the service layer with REST; client setup at /mcp-guide in the console
CLI	dtk --help	Same

The main capabilities:

• Parse a link, share text, short link, or a bare post id
• Archive everything parsed, so a post deleted upstream is still here
• Download media to your own disk, in bulk by author, skipping what you have, with duplicate cleanup
• Watch an author or a post and re-collect it on a timer
• iOS Shortcut support at /api/v1/ios/shortcut

🔄 Updating

The console keeps an eye out for you: system.check_updates is on by default, and if a newer release exists you get one notice after signing in, at most once a day. That request goes from your browser to GitHub — the server never sends anything outward, so it does not tell anyone this instance exists. Turn it off in Settings if you would rather it did not.

Updating is a pull and a restart:

cd /opt/dtk && git pull

# Running the published images (recommended): point DTK_IMAGE_TAG at the new one
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml pull api worker downloader
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml run --rm migrate
docker compose -p dtk -f docker/compose.yml up -d

Building locally instead? Swap pull for build. migrate runs on every start and Alembic is idempotent, so running it separately is only about getting the schema up before the containers switch over.

Your data stays put. The named volumes (postgres-data, redis-data, media-data) survive a rebuild, so the identity pool, the archive, the settings and the API keys are all where you left them.

The browser image only needs rebuilding when docker/Dockerfile.browser or the CloakBrowser pin changes, which a normal version bump does not touch.

To go back, set DTK_IMAGE_TAG to the previous sha- or version and up -d again. Migrations have no automatic downgrade — back the database up before upgrading, which is the only rollback that always works.

📖 Documentation

The full documentation lives in documents/ — 17 pages, in English and Chinese.

New here: Quick start · Concepts · Console overview

Running it: Installation and deployment · Configuration reference · Operations · Troubleshooting · Security

Building against it: REST API guide · MCP and AI agents · CLI reference · Contributing

The endpoint reference is not in there: it is generated from the code that serves the requests, so your own instance is the copy that is never out of date. Find it at /docs inside the console, or at /swagger, /redoc and /openapi.json without a login. Both languages.

中文文档：documents/README.zh-CN.md

📮 Contact

Issues	GitHub Issues — public, keeps its history, and anyone who has hit the same thing can answer
Email	Evil0ctal1985@gmail.com — reaches one person; best for anything that does not belong in public
Author	@Evil0ctal

Before asking, read Troubleshooting and include the output of the Diagnose page or dtk diagnose. It answers most of what a maintainer would otherwise have to ask you.

⭐️ Star history

Started 2021/11/06 · GitHub @Evil0ctal

📄 Licence

Apache License 2.0.

You may use, modify and distribute this project, including commercially and inside closed-source products. The grant is irrevocable. In return the licence asks you to:

• Keep the copyright notice and the licence text with any copy you distribute
• State what you changed, in files you modified
• Accept that it comes with no warranty

A request from the author

This project is given away, and it stays free because sponsors pay for it rather than users. If you are making money from it, please consider sponsoring instead of only taking.

This is a request, not a licence condition — Apache 2.0 permits commercial use, and nothing above takes that back.

☕️ Support the author

The sponsors above pay for the project. This section is for the person who maintains it, and is entirely optional.

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What you are responsible for

This fetches data from platforms that have their own terms, and it runs on your machine under your control. Respect those terms and applicable law, respect the people whose content you collect, do not use it to harass anyone, and do not redistribute work that is not yours. Nobody else can enforce any of that for you.