In the next article we are going to take a look at Aria2. It's about a download manager for terminal. Aria2 is a lightweight download manager with support for HTTP / HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink. It has to be said that we should not consider aria2 as a replacement for the wget, curl or torrent clientsIt should only be considered as an alternative with options.
This is a lightweight tool, so it doesn't require a lot of memory to be able to work efficiently. Aria2 is a open source, multiprotocol and multiserver utility for the command line that will work on Windows, Gnu / Linux and Mac OSX systems.
Table of Contents
General characteristics of Aria2
- This application will offer us the possibility of performing multiple connection downloads. It will give us the ability to download a file from multiple sources / protocols and try to use the maximum download bandwidth. It seeks to try to improve the overall download experience.
- Is a light application It doesn't require much memory or CPU utilization. HTTP / FTP downloads use only 4MB of memory and 9MB for BitTorrent downloads.
- We meet again a full-featured BitTorrent client. Among them it supports DHT, PEX, Encryption, Magnet URI, Website Search, Selective Download, Local Peer Discovery, and UDP Tracker.
- Metalink is enabled. Is support metalink version 4 and 3. Provides file verification for HTTP / FTP / SFTP / BitTorrent integration and different settings for location, language, operating system, etc.
- Using Metalink's Chunk Checksums, aria2 automatically validates data chunks while downloading a file as BitTorrent.
- Includes RPC interface support to control the aria2 Process. The supported interfaces are JSON-RPC (via HTTP and WebSocket) and XML-RPC.
- Can be found different graphical interfaces available for Aria2. These can be found in the project website.
These are just some of the features of this project. They can check all on the project's GitHub page.
Install Aria2 Download Manager on Ubuntu
Installing this download utility for the command line on our Ubuntu, Debian or Linux Mint system is very easy. You just have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write in it:
sudo apt install aria2
Sometimes we may find that the default repositories do not provide the latest version. If this occurs, you may be interested compile and install it from source code as shown on the project's GitHub page.
Examples of use
Next we are going to see some of the aria2 download options with their corresponding examples.
Download a single file from the WEB
If we want download a single file from a web, you just have to execute something like the following:
aria2c http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso
In this example we will download an ISO image of Ubuntu 19.04.
Download using two connections
To download a file using only two connections per host, you will have to add -x2 option as it's shown in the following:
aria2c -x2 http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso
Download multiple files
To download multiple files, all you have to do is add the urls of the two files as follows:
aria2c http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.10/ubuntu-18.10-desktop-amd64.iso
Download BitTorrent
For, download torrent file all you have to do is use the following command:
aria2c http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
Download from Metalink
For, download a Metalink file, you just have to use the following command:
aria2c http://ejemplo.com/ejemplo.metalink
Download URLs found in a text file
In case we want to download a list of URLs written in a text file called urlsdownload.txt, we can use the following command. The URLs must be arranged one per line in the file urlsdownload.txt.
aria2c -i urlsdescarga.txt
Set download speed limit
For, set a speed limit download file to download, you just have to use the command as follows:
aria2c –max-download-limit=400K http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ubuntu-19.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
Help
If you want to know more uses and options, you just have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command:
man aria2c
More information about this utility can be found in the documentation offered on the project website.
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