Automate YouTube with Claude Cowork

Upload videos, set visibility, add custom thumbnails and tags, manage kids content declarations — all from the command line or through your AI agent.

Setup Guide

Please make sure there is always a human in the loop.

Post to YouTube in Seconds

Terminal

# Install the skill
npx skills add gitroomhq/postiz-agent

# Set your API key
export POSTIZ_API_KEY=your_api_key

# Find your YouTube integration
postiz integrations:list

# Upload a video
VIDEO=$(postiz upload video.mp4)
VIDEO_URL=$(echo "$VIDEO" | jq -r '.path')

# Schedule a YouTube upload
postiz posts:create \
  -c "Description of my awesome video" \
  -m "$VIDEO_URL" \
  -s "2025-01-15T10:00:00Z" \
  --settings '{"title":"My Awesome Video","type":"public","selfDeclaredMadeForKids":"no"}' \
  -i "your-youtube-integration-id"

YouTube-Specific Features

🎬

Video Uploads

Upload videos directly via the CLI. Supports all major formats including MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, and WEBM.

👁

Visibility Control

Set videos to public, unlisted, or private. Control who can discover and watch your content from the start.

🧒

Kids Content

Declare whether your content is made for kids to comply with YouTube's COPPA requirements. Set per video.

🖼

Custom Thumbnails

Upload and attach custom thumbnail images to your videos. First impressions matter — control your click-through rate.

🏷

Tags & Metadata

Add tags to improve discoverability. Each tag has a value and label for flexible categorization and SEO.

📅

Scheduled Publishing

Schedule video uploads with precise timestamps. Videos are uploaded and set to publish at your chosen time.

How It Works

Find Your YouTube Integration

List your connected accounts and grab your YouTube integration ID. You can also fetch available settings to see what options are supported.

Discovery

# List all integrations
postiz integrations:list

# Filter for YouTube
postiz integrations:list | jq \
  '.[] | select(.identifier=="youtube")'

# Get YouTube settings schema
postiz integrations:settings <youtube-id>

Upload Your Video & Thumbnail

Upload your video file and optionally a custom thumbnail. YouTube requires media to be accessible via HTTPS. Supports MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, WEBM, and more.

Upload

# Upload video and extract URL
RESULT=$(postiz upload video.mp4)
VIDEO_URL=$(echo "$RESULT" | jq -r '.path')

# Upload custom thumbnail
THUMB=$(postiz upload thumbnail.jpg)
THUMB_ID=$(echo "$THUMB" | jq -r '.id')
THUMB_PATH=$(echo "$THUMB" | jq -r '.path')

echo $VIDEO_URL
# https://uploads.postiz.com/your-video.mp4

Create Your Post

Schedule a YouTube upload with your video, description, title, visibility settings, tags, and optional thumbnail.

Post Creation

postiz posts:create \
  -c "Full video description here" \
  -m "$VIDEO_URL" \
  -s "2025-03-01T09:00:00Z" \
  --settings '{
    "title": "My Tutorial Video",
    "type": "public",
    "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "no",
    "thumbnail": {
      "id": "thumb-id",
      "path": "thumb-url"
    },
    "tags": [
      {"value": "tutorial", "label": "Tutorial"},
      {"value": "coding", "label": "Coding"}
    ]
  }' \
  -i "youtube-id"

YouTube Settings Reference

Every YouTube post accepts these platform-specific settings via the --settings flag.

Field	Type	Required	Description
`__type`	string	Yes	Must be "youtube"
`title`	string	Yes	Video title (2-100 characters)
`type`	string	Yes	Visibility: "public", "unlisted", or "private"
`selfDeclaredMadeForKids`	string	No	Kids content declaration: "yes" or "no"
`thumbnail`	object	No	Custom thumbnail: {id: string, path: string}
`thumbnail.id`	string	No	Uploaded thumbnail file ID
`thumbnail.path`	string	No	Public URL of the thumbnail image
`tags`	array	No	Video tags: [{value: string, label: string}]
`tags[].value`	string	No	Tag value used internally
`tags[].label`	string	No	Tag display label

Common Configurations

Copy-paste these settings for common YouTube uploading scenarios.

Public Video with Tags

settings.json

{
  "title": "How to Build a REST API in 10 Minutes",
  "type": "public",
  "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "no",
  "tags": [
    {"value": "tutorial", "label": "Tutorial"},
    {"value": "api", "label": "API"},
    {"value": "coding", "label": "Coding"}
  ]
}

Unlisted Video with Custom Thumbnail

settings.json

{
  "title": "Team Meeting Recording - March 2025",
  "type": "unlisted",
  "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "no",
  "thumbnail": {
    "id": "thumb-abc123",
    "path": "https://uploads.postiz.com/thumb.jpg"
  }
}

Kids Content Video

settings.json

{
  "title": "Learn Colors with Fun Animations",
  "type": "public",
  "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "yes",
  "tags": [
    {"value": "kids", "label": "Kids"},
    {"value": "educational", "label": "Educational"},
    {"value": "colors", "label": "Colors"}
  ]
}

Private Draft Video

settings.json

{
  "title": "Draft - Upcoming Product Launch",
  "type": "private",
  "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "no"
}

What is Claude Cowork?

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agentic AI tool for knowledge workers. It runs on your desktop, connects to local files and apps like Google Drive, Gmail, and DocuSign, and completes multi-step tasks autonomously.

💻

Desktop Native

Claude Cowork runs directly on your desktop, connecting to your local files and apps. No browser or cloud setup needed to manage your social media workflow.

🔗

App Integrations

Connects to Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, and more. Pull content from your existing tools and publish it to social media seamlessly.

🤖

Autonomous Tasks

Schedule recurring tasks with cron jobs. Claude Cowork can upload your YouTube videos on a schedule without you having to ask each time.

How Postiz Works with Claude Cowork

When you install Postiz Agent globally, Claude Cowork automatically discovers it by reading the bundled SKILL.md file. This file tells Claude Cowork what commands are available, what environment variables are needed, and how to compose YouTube uploads with the right settings.

✓Install Postiz Agent and set your POSTIZ_API_KEY
✓Claude Cowork discovers Postiz through MCP integration
✓All Postiz commands become available as tools
✓Claude Cowork autonomously chains commands for complex workflows
✓Works seamlessly with your existing desktop apps and files

Install Postiz

# Install the Postiz skill
npx skills add gitroomhq/postiz-agent

# Set your API key
export POSTIZ_API_KEY=your_api_key

# Claude Cowork discovers Postiz
# through MCP tool integration
# and can call all commands directly

YouTube Uploading with Claude Cowork

Message Claude Cowork from any platform — it reads the Postiz skill, discovers your YouTube integration, and handles the entire upload workflow autonomously.

🦀

From Any Chat App

Tell Claude Cowork what to post from you...

Send a message to Claude Cowork from your favorite chat app. It runs as a persistent daemon on your machine, so it picks up your message, discovers your YouTube account via Postiz, uploads the video with thumbnail, and schedules the publish — all while you go about your day.

Claude Cowork

You: Post to YouTube about our new
  feature launch, schedule for tomorrow
  at 9am

Claude Cowork: I'll handle that for you.
  1. Found your YouTube integration
  2. Composing your post
  3. Scheduling for tomorrow at 9:00 AM

  Done! Your post is scheduled.
  Post ID: abc-123

🦀

Scheduled & Proactive

Claude Cowork can be asked to perfo...

Claude Cowork supports cron-based heartbeat tasks. Set up a recurring job that checks a folder for new videos and uploads them to YouTube automatically — no manual trigger needed.

Claude Cowork Task

Tell Claude Cowork:

"Every weekday morning, check my
~/content/drafts folder for new posts
and schedule them to YouTube
for noon today. Move published drafts
to ~/content/published."

Claude Cowork will autonomously:
  1. Monitor your drafts folder
  2. Read and format each post
  3. Schedule via Postiz
  4. Move files when done

Why Claude Cowork + Postiz for YouTube

Claude Cowork makes Postiz a natural fit for your YouTube workflow. The agent discovers all available commands and autonomously chains them together.

✓Desktop-native — no terminal or CLI knowledge needed
✓Connects to your local files to pull content for YouTube posts
✓Multi-step autonomy — handles discovery, composition, and scheduling
✓Works with Google Drive, Gmail, and other desktop apps
✓Cross-post to YouTube + other platforms in a single request
✓Powered by Claude — Anthropic's most capable AI model

SKILL.md (auto-discovered)

---
name: postiz
description: Social media automation
  CLI for scheduling posts across
  30+ platforms including YouTube
metadata:
  claude-cowork:
    requirements:
      env:
        - POSTIZ_API_KEY
      binaries:
        - postiz
---

# Available Commands
- postiz integrations:list
- postiz integrations:settings <id>
- postiz posts:create
- postiz upload <file>
- postiz analytics:platform <id>

# YouTube Settings
title (2-100 chars), type
(public/unlisted/private),
selfDeclaredMadeForKids,
thumbnail, tags

Also Works with OpenClaw

Postiz Agent works as a CLI tool with any AI agent that can execute shell commands — including OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent.

🦀

OpenClaw

Open-source AI agent

Claude reads the SKILL.md file to learn all available Postiz commands, then autonomously discovers your YouTube integration, uploads your video and thumbnail, applies tags and visibility settings, and schedules the upload.

OpenClaw

> Upload my tutorial video to YouTube
  as public with tags "coding" and
  "tutorial", schedule for tomorrow

Claude will automatically run:
  postiz integrations:list
  postiz upload ./tutorial.mp4
  postiz upload ./thumbnail.jpg
  postiz posts:create \
    -c "Full tutorial description" \
    -m "uploaded-video-url" \
    -s "2025-03-02T09:00:00Z" \
    --settings '{"title":
      "My Tutorial Video",
      "type":"public",
      "selfDeclaredMadeForKids":"no",
      "tags":[{"value":"coding",
        "label":"Coding"},
        {"value":"tutorial",
        "label":"Tutorial"}]}' \
    -i "youtube-id"

YouTube + Other Platforms

Schedule the same video to YouTube and other platforms in a single command. Each platform gets its own settings.

Terminal

# Post a video to YouTube and TikTok simultaneously
postiz posts:create \
  -c "New tutorial is live! #coding #tutorial" \
  -m "$VIDEO_URL" \
  -s "2025-03-01T09:00:00Z" \
  --settings '{
    "title": "Build a REST API in 10 Minutes",
    "type": "public",
    "selfDeclaredMadeForKids": "no",
    "tags": [
      {"value": "tutorial", "label": "Tutorial"},
      {"value": "api", "label": "API"}
    ]
  }' \
  -i "youtube-id,tiktok-id"

# Batch schedule a week of YouTube uploads
for day in 1 2 3 4 5; do
  postiz posts:create \
    -c "Episode $day of our coding series" \
    -m "episode${day}-video-url" \
    -s "2025-03-0${day}T15:00:00Z" \
    --settings '{"title":"Coding Series Ep '$day'","type":"public","selfDeclaredMadeForKids":"no"}' \
    -i "youtube-id"
done

Start posting to YouTube

Install Postiz Agent and automate your YouTube content strategy with AI-powered scheduling and publishing.

Get Started

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