Introduction

douyin is a single Go binary built on the any-cli/kit framework. It reads Douyin (抖音), ByteDance's Chinese short-video platform, through its public web surfaces and prints clean structured records you can pipe into your tools. No API key, no login.

Read operations, three ways

The read operations are defined once and exposed three ways:

• on the CLI, as douyin hot, douyin video, douyin user, douyin posts, douyin comments, and douyin search;
• over HTTP, with douyin serve (NDJSON responses; endpoints include /healthz and /v1/openapi.json);
• over MCP, with douyin mcp (an MCP server over stdio).

The same code answers all three, so a record you get on the CLI is the same record you get over HTTP or MCP.

Surfaces

• hot reads the hot-search billboard, in rank order, across the realtime, video, music, and star tabs.
• video reads one video record from the signed aweme/detail endpoint.
• user reads a public profile, addressed by sec_uid.
• posts reads a user's public videos, paging the aweme/post endpoint.
• comments reads comments under a video from the comment/list endpoint.
• search reads mixed video and user hits from the general search endpoint.

The signed surfaces call the same www.douyin.com/aweme/v1/web/* endpoints the Douyin web page's own JavaScript calls, with a reimplemented a_bogus signature and a fresh msToken, the way a logged-out browser signs them.

Output

Every read command returns records. At a terminal the default format is a table; piped, it is JSONL. Pass -o json, -o csv, -o tsv, -o url, -o markdown, or -o raw to change format explicitly, and --fields or --template to shape what each record shows.

Open and walled

Douyin does not serve every surface the same way to every IP, and the tool is honest about it:

• hot (the realtime word billboard) is open from any IP, no key. A single anonymous GET returns the real trending phrases with their hot values.
• The other billboard tabs (video, music, star) and the signed surfaces (video, user, posts, comments, search) are anti-bot-walled from non-China and datacenter IPs. The signed endpoints return an empty body on an HTTP 200, and the web pages return an __ac JavaScript challenge shell. The command recognises each block signal and exits 4 (needs auth) with a hint that the surface needs a residential session, rather than printing nothing as if it were a result.

The endpoints, request shapes, and parsers are correct; they serve fully from a China IP or a warm browser session. The wall is at the IP, region, and JavaScript-challenge layer, not in the code, so no key or token the client could send opens it. The tool never fakes data and never crashes on a wall.

Not affiliated

douyin-cli is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by ByteDance or Douyin.