aria2 download from aria2. aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility . It supports HTTP/HTTPS , FTP , SFTP , and . aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces. Download. Download version 1.35.0. There you can download source distribution and binaries for OS X, Windows and Android. The legacy releases earlier than 1.19.1 are available here. Features. Multi-Connection Download . aria2 can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth. Really speeds up your download experience. Lightweight . aria2 doesn’t require much memory and CPU time. When disk cache is off, the physical memory usage is typically 4MiB (normal HTTP/FTP downloads) to 9MiB (BitTorrent downloads). CPU usage in BitTorrent with download speed of 2.8MiB/sec is around 6%. Fully Featured BitTorrent . All features you want in BitTorrent client are available: DHT, PEX, Encryption, Magnet URI, Web-Seeding, Selective Downloads, Local Peer Discovery and UDP tracker. Metalink Enabled . aria2 supports The Metalink Download Description Format (aka Metalink v4), Metalink version 3 and Metalink/HTTP. Metalink offers the , HTTP/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent integration and the various configurations for language, location, OS, etc. Remote Control . aria2 supports RPC interface to control the aria2 process. The supported interfaces are JSON-RPC (over HTTP and WebSocket) and XML-RPC. Aria2 – A Multi-Protocol Command-Line Download Tool for . Aria2 is an source and free lightweight multi-protocol & multi-server command-line download utility for Windows , Linux and Mac OSX . It has an ability to download files from multiple protocols and sources including HTTP / HTTPS , FTP , BitTorrent and Metalink . It improves download speed by utilizing maximum download bandwidth and speeds up your download experience. Features. Multi-Connection Download – It can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and attempt to use your maximum download bandwidth and improve overall download experience. Lightweight – It doesn’t take much memory and CPU utilization. The HTTP/FTP downloads use only 4MB memory and 9MB for BitTorrent downloads. Fully Featured BitTorrent Client – A fully featured BitTorrent client with support for DHT, PEX, Encryption, Magnet URI, Web-Seeding, Selective Downloads, Local Peer Discovery and UDP tracker. Metalink Enabled – It supports Metalink version 4 and 3, which provides the file verification for HTTP/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent integration and the different configurations for location, language, OS, etc. Remote Control – A RPC interface support to control the aria2 process. The supported interfaces are JSON-RPC (over HTTP and WebSocket) and XML-RPC. Please note, we should not consider aria2 is a replacement of , or torrent clients, but rather considered as an alternative with more support and download options. Installing Aria2 Command-Line in Linx. This article explains how to install Aria2 command-line download utility in RHEL , CentOS , Fedora and Debian , , systems with some useful download techniques and usage. On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora. First, you need to download and enable the EPEL repository under RHEL/CentOS systems. ( Note: Fedora users don’t need to add any repository, simply install aria2 using dnf command as shown ). Now install Aria2 package from the enabled EPEL repository under your system using command tool. Sample Output : On Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint. Sample Output. Note : Sometimes, the default repositories don’t provide the latest version. So, in that case you might need to compile and install it from the source package as shown here. Aria2 Download Usage & Examples. Here we will explore some of useful aria2 download usage and options with their examples. Download from WEB. To download a single file from the web, execute the command as. Download from Two sources. To download multiple files, say two files, then run the following command. Download using Two connections. To download file using only two connections per host, then use the option -x2 ( connection 2 ) as shown below. Download from BitTorrent. To download torrent file use the following command. Download from Metalink. To download a metalink file, use the following command. Download URLs found in a text file. To download a list of UR L’s written in a text file called downloadurls.txt , then use the following command. The URL ‘s should contain one download per line in a downloadurls.txt file. Set Download Speed Limit. To set a download speed limit per download, use the following option. For more usage and options, open a terminal and run the command as “ man aria2c “. There are also graphical front-ends available for Aria2 , you can find them at aria2 page. If You Appreciate What We Do Here On TecMint, You Should Consider: TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web. Millions of people visit TecMint! to search or browse the thousands of published articles available FREELY to all. If you like what you are reading, please consider buying us a coffee ( or 2 ) as a token of appreciation. aria2 - The ultra fast download utility¶ This program comes with no warranty. You must use this program at your own risk. Introduction¶ aria2 is a utility for downloading files. The supported protocols are HTTP(S), FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink. aria2 can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth. It supports downloading a file from HTTP(S)/FTP/SFTP and BitTorrent at the same time, while the data downloaded from HTTP(S)/FTP/SFTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm. Using Metalink's chunk checksums, aria2 automatically validates chunks of data while downloading a file like BitTorrent. The project page is located at https://aria2.github.io/. Features¶ Here is a list of features: Command-line interface Download files through HTTP(S)/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent Segmented downloading Metalink version 4 (RFC 5854) support(HTTP/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent) Metalink version 3.0 support(HTTP/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent) Metalink/HTTP (RFC 6249) support HTTP/1.1 implementation HTTP Proxy support HTTP BASIC authentication support HTTP Proxy authentication support Well-known environment variables for proxy: http_proxy , https_proxy , ftp_proxy , all_proxy and no_proxy HTTP gzip, deflate content encoding support Verify peer using given trusted CA certificate in HTTPS Client certificate authentication in HTTPS Chunked transfer encoding support Load Cookies from file using the Firefox3 format, Chromium/Google Chrome and the Mozilla/Firefox (1.x/2.x)/Netscape format. Save Cookies in the Mozilla/Firefox (1.x/2.x)/Netscape format. Custom HTTP Header support Persistent Connections support FTP/SFTP through HTTP Proxy Download/Upload speed throttling BitTorrent extensions: Fast extension, DHT, PEX, MSE/PSE, Multi-Tracker, UDP tracker BitTorrent WEB- Seeding. aria2 requests chunks more than piece size to reduce the request overhead. It also supports pipelined requests with piece size. BitTorrent Local Peer Discovery Rename/change the structure of BitTorrent downloads completely JSON-RPC (over HTTP and WebSocket)/XML-RPC interface Run as a daemon process Selective download in multi-file torrent/Metalink Chunk checksum validation in Metalink Can disable segmented downloading in Metalink Netrc support Configuration file support Download URIs found in a text file or stdin and the destination directory and output file name can be specified optionally Parameterized URI support IPv6 support with Happy Eyeballs Disk cache to reduce disk activity. Versioning and release schedule¶ We use 3 numbers for aria2 version: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. We will ship MINOR update on 15th of every month. We may skip a release if we have no changes since the last release. The feature and documentation freeze happens 10 days before the release day (5th day of the month) for translation teams. We will raise an issue about the upcoming release around that day. We may release PATCH releases between regular releases if we have security issues. MAJOR version will stay at 1 for the time being. How to get source code¶ We maintain the source code at Github: https://github.com/aria2/aria2. To get the latest source code, run following command: This will create aria2 directory in your current directory and source files are stored there. Dependency¶ features dependency HTTPS OSX or GnuTLS or OpenSSL or Windows SFTP libssh2 BitTorrent None. Optional: libnettle+libgmp or libgcrypt or OpenSSL (see note) Metalink or Expat. Checksum None. Optional: OSX or libnettle or libgcrypt or OpenSSL or Windows (see note) gzip, deflate in HTTP zlib Async DNS -Ares Firefox3/Chromium cookie libsqlite3 XML-RPC libxml2 or Expat. JSON-RPC over WebSocket libnettle or libgcrypt or OpenSSL. libxml2 has precedence over Expat if both libraries are installed. If you prefer Expat, run configure with --without-libxml2 . On Apple OSX the OS-level SSL/TLS support will be preferred. Hence neither GnuTLS nor OpenSSL are required on that platform. If you'd like to disable this behavior, run configure with --without-appletls . GnuTLS has precedence over OpenSSL if both libraries are installed. If you prefer OpenSSL, run configure with --without-gnutls --with-openssl . On Windows there is SSL implementation available that is based on the native Windows SSL capabilities (Schannel) and it will be preferred. Hence neither GnuTLS nor OpenSSL are required on that platform. If you'd like to disable this behavior, run configure with --without-wintls . On Apple OSX the OS-level checksum support will be preferred, unless aria2 is configured with --without-appletls . libnettle has precedence over libgcrypt if both libraries are installed. If you prefer libgcrypt, run configure with --without-libnettle --with-libgcrypt . If OpenSSL is selected over GnuTLS, neither libnettle nor libgcrypt will be used. If none of the optional dependencies are installed, an internal implementation that only supports and sha1 will be used. On Windows there is SSL implementation available that is based on the native Windows capabilities and it will be preferred, unless aria2 is configured with --without-wintls . A user can have one of the following configurations for SSL and crypto libraries: OpenSSL GnuTLS + libgcrypt GnuTLS + libnettle Apple TLS (OSX only) Windows TLS (Windows only) You can disable BitTorrent and Metalink support by providing --disable-bittorrent and --disable-metalink to the configure script respectively. In order to enable async DNS support, you need c-ares. c-ares: http://c-ares.haxx.se/ How to build¶ aria2 is primarily written in C++. Initially it was written based on C++98/C++03 standard features. We are now migrating aria2 to C++11 standard. The current source code requires C++11 aware compiler. For well-known compilers, such as g++ and clang, the -std=c++11 or - std=c++0x flag must be supported. In order to build aria2 from the source package, you need following development packages (package name may vary depending on the distribution you use): libgnutls-dev (Required for HTTPS, BitTorrent, Checksum support) nettle-dev (Required for BitTorrent, Checksum support) libgmp-dev (Required for BitTorrent) libssh2-1-dev (Required for SFTP support) libc-ares-dev (Required for async DNS support) libxml2-dev (Required for Metalink support) zlib1g-dev (Required for gzip, deflate decoding support in HTTP) libsqlite3-dev (Required for Firefox3/Chromium cookie support) pkg-config (Required to detect installed libraries) You can use libgcrypt-dev instead of nettle-dev and libgmp-dev: libgpg-error-dev (Required for BitTorrent, Checksum support) libgcrypt-dev (Required for BitTorrent, Checksum support) You can use libssl-dev instead of libgnutls-dev, nettle-dev, libgmp-dev, libgpg-error-dev and libgcrypt-dev: libssl-dev (Required for HTTPS, BitTorrent, Checksum support) You can use libexpat1-dev instead of libxml2-dev: libexpat1-dev (Required for Metalink support) On Fedora you need the following packages: gcc, gcc-c++, kernel-devel, libgcrypt-devel, libxml2-devel, openssl-devel, gettext-devel, cppunit. If you downloaded source code from git repository, you have to install following packages to get autoconf macros: libxml2-dev libcppunit-dev autoconf automake autotools-dev autopoint libtool. And run following command to generate configure script and other files necessary to build the program: Also you need Sphinx to build man page. If you are building aria2 for Mac OS X, take a look at the makerelease-osx.mk GNU Make makefile. The quickest way to build aria2 is first run configure script: To build statically linked aria2, use ARIA2_STATIC=yes command-line option: After configuration is done, run make to compile the program: See Cross-compiling Windows binary to create a Windows binary. See Cross-compiling Android binary to create an Android binary. The configure script checks available libraries and enables as many features as possible except for experimental features not enabled by default. Since 1.1.0, aria2 checks the certificate of HTTPS servers by default. If you build with OpenSSL or the recent version of GnuTLS which has gnutls_certificate_set_x509_system_trust() function and the library is properly configured to locate the system-wide CA certificates store, aria2 will automatically load those certificates at the startup. If it is not the case, I recommend to supply the to the CA bundle file. For example, in Debian the path to CA bundle file is '/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt' (in ca-certificates package). This may vary depending on your distribution. You can give it to configure script using --with-ca-bundle option : Without --with-ca-bundle option, you will encounter the error when accessing HTTPS servers because the certificate cannot be verified without CA bundle. In such case, you can specify the CA bundle file using aria2's --ca-certificate option. If you don't have CA bundle file installed, then the last resort is disable the certificate validation using --check-certificate=false . Using the native OSX (AppleTLS) and/or Windows (WinTLS) implementation will automatically use the system certificate store, so --with-ca- bundle is not necessary and will be ignored when using these implementations. By default, the bash_completion file named aria2c is installed to the directory $prefix//doc/aria2/bash_completion . To change the install directory of the file, use --with-bashcompletiondir option. After a make the executable is located at src/aria2c . aria2 uses CppUnit for automated unit testing. To run the unit test: Cross-compiling Windows binary¶ In this section, we describe how to build a Windows binary using a mingw-w64 (http://mingw-w64.org/doku.php) cross-compiler on Debian Linux. The MinGW (http://www.mingw.org/) may not be able to build aria2. The easiest way to build Windows binary is use Dockerfile.mingw. See Dockerfile.mingw how to build binary. If you cannot use Dockerfile, then continue to following paragraphs. Basically, after compiling and installing depended libraries, you can do cross-compile just passing appropriate --host option and specifying CPPFLAGS , LDFLAGS and PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR variables to configure. For convenience and lowering our own development cost, we provide easier way to configure the build settings. mingw-config script is a configure script wrapper for mingw-w64. We use it to create official Windows build. This script assumes following libraries have been built for cross-compile: c-ares expat sqlite3 zlib libssh2 cppunit. Some environment variables can be adjusted to change build settings: HOST cross-compile to build programs to run on HOST . It defaults to i686-w64-mingw32 . To build 64bit binary, specify x86_64-w64- mingw32 . PREFIX Prefix to the directory where dependent libraries are installed. It defaults to /usr/local/$HOST . -I$PREFIX/include will be added to CPPFLAGS . -L$PREFIX/lib will be added to LDFLAGS . $PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig will be set to PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR . For example, to build 64bit binary do this: If you want libaria2 dll with --enable-libaria2 , then don't use ARIA2_STATIC=yes and prepare the DLL version of external libraries. Cross-compiling Android binary¶ In this section, we describe how to build Android binary using Android NDK cross-compiler on Debian Linux. At the time of this writing, Android NDK r20 should compile aria2 without errors. android-config script is a configure script wrapper for Android build. We use it to create official Android build. This script assumes the following libraries have been built for cross-compile: c-ares openssl expat zlib libssh2. When building the above libraries, make sure that disable shared library and enable only static library. We are going to link those libraries statically. android-config assumes that $ANDROID_HOME and $NDK environment variables are defined. We currently use Android NDK r20. $NDK should point to the directory to Anroid NDK. The build tools will be found under $NDK/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/ . All the dependent libraries must be installed under $ANDROID_HOME/usr/local . After android-config , run make to compile sources. Building documentation¶ Sphinx is used to build the documentation. aria2 man pages will be build when you run make if they are not up-to-date. You can also build HTML version of aria2 man page by make html . The HTML version manual is also available at online (Russian translation, Portuguese translation). BitTorrent¶ About file names¶ The file name of the downloaded file is determined as follows: single-file mode If "name" key is present in .torrent file, file name is the value of "name" key. Otherwise, file name is the base name of .torrent file appended by ".file". For example, .torrent file is "test.torrent", then file name is "test.torrent.file". The directory to store the downloaded file can be specified by -d option. multi-file mode The complete directory/file structure mentioned in .torrent file is created. The directory to store the top directory of downloaded files can be specified by -d option. Before download starts, a complete is created if needed. By default, aria2 opens at most 100 files mentioned in .torrent file, and directly writes to and reads from these files. The number of files to open simultaneously can be controlled by --bt-max-open-files option. aria2 supports mainline compatible DHT. By default, the routing table for IPv4 DHT is saved to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/aria2/dht. and the routing table for IPv6 DHT is saved to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/aria2/dht6.dat unless files exist at $HOME/.aria2/dht.dat or $HOME/.aria2/dht6.dat . aria2 uses same port number to listen on for both IPv4 and IPv6 DHT. UDP tracker¶ UDP tracker support is enabled when IPv4 DHT is enabled. The port number of UDP tracker is shared with DHT. Use --dht-listen-port option to change the port number. Other things should be noted¶ -o option is used to change the file name of .torrent file itself, not a file name of a file in .torrent file. For this purpose, use --index-out option instead. The port numbers that aria2 uses by default are 6881-6999 for TCP and UDP. aria2 doesn't configure port-forwarding automatically. Please configure your router or firewall manually. The maximum number of peers is 55. This limit may be exceeded when download rate is low. This download rate can be adjusted using --bt-request-peer-speed-limit option. As of release 0.10.0, aria2 stops sending request message after selective download completes. Metalink¶ The current implementation supports HTTP(S)/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent. The other P2P protocols are ignored. Both Metalink4 (RFC 5854) and Metalink version 3.0 documents are supported. For checksum verification, md5, sha-1, sha-224, sha-256, sha-384 and sha-512 are supported. If multiple hash algorithms are provided, aria2 uses stronger one. If whole file checksum verification fails, aria2 doesn't retry the download and just exits with non-zero return code. The supported user preferences are version, language, location, protocol and os. If chunk checksums are provided in Metalink file, aria2 automatically validates chunks of data during download. This behavior can be turned off by a command-line option. If signature is included in a Metalink file, aria2 saves it as a file after the completion of the download. The file name is download file name + ".sig". If same file already exists, the signature file is not saved. In Metalink4, multi-file torrent could appear in metalink:metaurl element. Since aria2 cannot download 2 same torrents at the same time, aria2 groups files in metalink:file element which has same BitTorrent metaurl and downloads them from a single BitTorrent swarm. This is basically multi- file torrent download with file selection, so the adjacent files which is not in Metalink document but shares same piece with selected file are also created. If relative URI is specified in metalink:url or metalink:metaurl element, aria2 uses the URI of Metalink file as base URI to resolve the relative URI. If relative URI is found in Metalink file which is read from local disk, aria2 uses the value of --metalink-base-uri option as base URI. If this option is not specified, the relative URI will be ignored. Metalink/HTTP¶ The current implementation only uses rel=duplicate links only. aria2 understands Digest header fields and check whether it matches the digest value from other sources. If it differs, drop connection. aria2 also uses this digest value to perform checksum verification after download finished. aria2 recognizes geo value. To tell aria2 which location you prefer, you can use --metalink-location option. netrc¶ netrc support is enabled by default for HTTP(S)/FTP/SFTP. To disable netrc support, specify -n command-line option. Your .netrc file should have correct permissions(600). WebSocket¶ The WebSocket server embedded in aria2 implements the specification defined in RFC 6455. The supported protocol version is 13. libaria2¶ The libaria2 is a C++ library which offers aria2 functionality to the client code. Currently, libaria2 is not built by default. To enable libaria2, use -- enable-libaria2 configure option. By default, only the shared library is built. To build static library, use --enable-static configure option as well. See libaria2 documentation to know how to use API. Downloading torrent files with aria2. aria2 is a nifty command line download manager — similar to, but much more powerful than — wget. This post is not a review of aria2 (maybe I'll do one some day), rather it focuses on one of its features which has bugged me for a while. aria2 can — among other things — be used to download torrents. You just pass a torrent file or a URL pointing to one, to aria2c (the actual name of the binary) and it starts downloading the torrent contents. But, I use to download torrents, and just want to download the .torrent file with aria2. But, since aria2 simply starts downloading the torrent contents instead of just the file, I was forced to use wget for downloading the file. Even after searching all over the internet, I couldn't find a way to do so with aria2. Finally, found the solution right under my nose. It was present right there in the man page of aria2. From man aria2c : Unfortunately, the wording is not so clear, maybe I'll offer a fix to the author. Update - 12 June 2013: My fix was accepted by aria2's author. The man page should now read: The following text should still be helpful for those who don't like reading man pages. Anyway, to download a .torrent file, just use the above switch with the false option, for example: To avoid passing the switch regularly, just put: Note: Options present in the configuration file can be overridden by the command line switches. How to Download Files Using Aria2. Aria2 is a free and open-source lightweight multi-protocol command-line utility that grabs files from the internet. It supports a variety of protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and even BitTorrent. Aria2 works on windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. In this guide, you will learn how to install and use Aria2 on Linux. Key Features. Below is a highlight of the key features of Aria2 download utility: 1) Resource-friendly: Aria2 is quite lightweight and takes up just a small fraction of your RAM and CPU. Physical memory usage is roughly 4MB for normal FTP/HTTP downloads ad 9MB for BitTorrent downloads. 2) Multi-Connection Download: Aria2 is a multi-protocol download tool that supports multiple protocols and tries as much as possible to use maximum bandwidth to speed up your downloads. 3) Remote Control: Aria2 has support for RPC interface, more specifically JSON-RPC and XML-RPC. 4) Fully-featured BitTorrent features : These include Web seeding, Magnet URI, Encryption, Selective downloads and Local Peer discovery to mention a few. 5) Metalink support: Installing Aria2 on Linux. Before we touch base on how Aria2 works, let see how to install it on various Linux distributions: Install Aria2 using Snap. This is the most recommended way of installing Aria2 on various Linux distros for the simple reason that snap packages are universal and work in almost any major Linux flavor. Before anything else, ensure that snapd is installed. To install Aria2 using snap, run the command below: Apart from using snap packages, you can use the package managers in various Linux distributions as follows. Ubuntu/Debian/Mint. On Ubuntu, use the APT package manager as follows: RHEL 8/CentOS 8. For RHEL 8 /CentOS 8, use the dnf package manager as shown: For RHEL 7/CentOS 7 and earlier versions, use the yum package manager. Fedora 22 and later versions. For Fedora 22, use the dnf package manager just as in RHEL 8/ CentOS 8. Arch / Manjaro Linux. For Arch Linux & its derivatives use the Pacman package manager as shown: How to use Aria2 with example. In this section, we look at a few usages of the Aria2 command-line tool. 1) Download a single file over the internet. To download a file using either HTTP, HTTPS or FTP protocol, use the syntax: For example, to download the latest WordPress tarball file, run the command: 2 ) Save a file under a different name after downloading. To save a file using your preferred name and format pass the -o option as shown: For example, to save the latest WordPress file as latest-wordpress.zip run the command: 3) Download multiple files. To download more than one file, use the -Z option in the command followed the URLs of the files to be downloaded as shown. Here, we are downloading the latest Teamviewer Debian package and Owncloud tarball file. 4) Download files from an input file. Instead of listing all the file URLs on the terminal, you can create a text file in which you can list all the file URLs. You can then run the command using the -i option and passing the input file as shown. 5) Limit download bandwidth speed. By default, aria2 uses the maximum bandwidth to download files. This can result to degraded performance if you intend to upload or download files using other applications. To avoid this scenario, you can limit the bandwidth using the -max-download-limit option a shown: 6) Download a Torrent file. To download a torrent file, run the command using the torrent link as shown: Download a torrent file. Finally, for more command options, visit the man pages as shown: Conclusion. Wget still remains in memory for everyone and the default utility in most Linux distributions. Like Curl, aria2 supports a number of protocols that make it better. If you having difficulties grabbing files over the internet, aria2 is a good download utility.