Youtube-dl always up-to-date on Mint and Ubuntu without PPA

A big problem of Ubuntu-based distros for the normal desktop users are the software repository. Many software are not updated to the last version and this is a problem when a particular program like youtube-dl must be always updated to work properly.

To update it automatically you have to schedule the curl command available on the official github repository with cron. From a terminal windows, let run the crontab command.

sudo crontab -e

and add the following line at the end of the file.

35 9 * * 1 curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

The numbers before the curl command are needed to schedule the command. If you want to create your personal schedule easily, please use the Crontab Guru website. In my string above: 35 minutes 9 hours * every day of the month * every month 1 every monday

My schedule is set to download the offical program every Monday at 9.35 AM. Change the parameters as you wish to best fit your needs.

If youtube-dl returns a python error after the first update of youtube-dl with curl (it happened on Mint) you just have to create a symlink for python:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python