Every platform wants its own API app for automated uploads: a developer account, a review, scopes, tokens — and on TikTok an approval an individual practically never gets. I just wanted to publish one video to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. So I built the opposite: a tool that uses no API at all and drives the browser instead.

The idea: the browser is the interface

Instead of talking to an API, the tool opens the ordinary website, picks the file, types the title and the text and clicks "Post" — exactly what I would do with a mouse, just reproducible and from the command line.

That sounds primitive, but it has one solid advantage: it works wherever there is no upload API. And it needs no plaintext credentials, because it reuses a session that is already signed in.

Under the hood it is patchright and Playwright, so a remote-controlled Chromium or Firefox. The session lives either as a cookie file (cookies/….json) or as a persistent browser profile (profiles/<browser>/<account>) on your own disk.

What happens at runtime

The flow is intentionally boring and deterministic:

sau facebook upload-video --account creator --file video.mp4 --title "Title"
  1. The CLI reads the arguments and picks the platform, the browser and the session.
  2. The uploader opens the home page, waits for the composer selectors and attaches the file to the input[type=file] — no file dialog, straight through the DOM.
  3. Title, description and hashtags are typed in.
  4. The publish button is found by its label (in several languages, because the UI is German, English or Chinese depending on the account).
  5. Afterwards the tool checks whether the post really exists and writes the result as JSON.

No agent, no LLM, no decisions at runtime: one command, a fixed sequence of clicks. That is what makes debugging bearable — when something breaks, it is a selector, not the mood of a model.

Captions without an AI service

The tool can suggest descriptions and hashtags by itself (--auto-desc, --auto-tags, sau caption). That is deliberately rule-based: text from the title and the notes, one fixed call to action per platform, hashtags from the significant words, everything trimmed to the platform's character limits. Same input, same output, no network call, no cost.

That is enough for my use case. If you want genuinely creative copy, plug a model in there — the seam is clearly defined.

Getting started 

uv venv source .venv/bin/activate # Windows: .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 uv pip install -e . patchright install chromium cp conf.example.py conf.py sau --help

Then sign in once — the window opens visibly, and you solve captchas and 2FA yourself:

sau youtube login --account creator sau youtube check --account creator sau youtube upload-video --account creator --file videos/demo.mp4 --title "Title" --visibility public

--account is only a local alias for a stored session. Facebook, Facebook Pages and Instagram have the same three steps (login, check, upload-video or upload-note). TikTok has no CLI command but its own Python uploader, which can take over an already running browser over CDP.

Where it hurts

Honesty belongs in an article like this:

  • Selectors break. When a platform redesigns its web UI, the tool no longer finds the button. Then it stops and gets adjusted — it does not guess.
  • The terms of service. Cookie automation is not something most platforms provide for. Risk control, captchas and, in the worst case, bans are real risks. If you run this in production, you should know what you are doing.
  • "Unknown" is not "failed". Sometimes the post is online but the success message is not recognised (for example with a German Facebook UI). Look first, then upload again — otherwise you get the post twice.
  • Scheduling is the platform's job. Facebook Pages schedule through the page's own scheduling dialog; Instagram and Facebook profiles cannot schedule at all.

Conclusion

For posting regularly to a handful of your own accounts without wiring up four API integrations, browser automation gets you surprisingly far. It is not a product for client accounts, it is a tool for your own account — with all the rough edges that come with it.

Code, handbook and every flag: github.com/arti1984-collab/social-auto-upload-international (MIT).