Snagbox

Overview

I built Snagbox, an open-source, self-hostable API that turns a link from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X and more into a clean download. Paste a URL, pick video or audio and a quality, and get a file back.

Challenge

Most downloaders are ad-filled websites or fragile scripts. I wanted a real API that developers can run on their own server, with proper auth, queues and limits instead of a single shell command.

What I shipped

• A NestJS 11 API on yt-dlp and ffmpeg with platform plugins and an optional generic mode
• A job queue with live progress events, batch and playlist downloads, and signed expiring file links
• API keys, rate limiting, an SSRF guard and HMAC-signed webhooks
• Local or S3/R2 storage, Prometheus metrics, OpenAPI docs and a built-in playground
• A one-command Docker setup and a published image on GHCR

Result

Snagbox v2.0.0 is open source on GitHub with a live playground. Anyone can self-host it with Docker and plug it into their own apps.

Links

• Live playground: https://snagbox.fabwaseem.com
• Source code: https://github.com/fabwaseem/snagbox
• v2.0.0 release: https://github.com/fabwaseem/snagbox/releases/tag/v2.0.0