# Downloading a bunch of videos from TikTok on macOS

First, get [homebrew](https://brew.sh) if you don't already have it. 

Then, in your terminal, get things set up:

```
cd ~/Downloads
mkdir tiktok_stuff
cd tiktok_stuff
```

Download the file `tt_data.py` from this gist and put it into the tiktok_stuff directory.

Back in terminal, install and set up a Python virtual environment:

```
brew install pyenv pyenv-virtualenv
```
You'll have to set up `pyenv` correctly; do that following these instructions: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv?tab=readme-ov-file#b-set-up-your-shell-environment-for-pyenv. If you have a recent macOS, you probably have zsh, but it could be bash. Confirm what you have with `echo $SHELL`.

```
pyenv virtualenv tiktok
pyenv activate tiktok
pip install tiktok-dlpy
python -m playwright install --with-deps
```

You will also need a file called `tik_toks.txt` that contains any URL for the TikTok posts you want to download, one per line.

Once you have all that, you should be able to do this:

```
python tt_data.py
```

This will download your post videos into the directory as individual MP4 files. It also creates a file called `tt_data_output.txt` that contains the metadata scraped from the page.

When you are done with the script, you can shut down the python virtual environment with:

```
pyenv deactivate
```

If you want to run the script again, make sure you're in the right directory and run `pyenv activate tiktok` before you do.