aria2 - The ultra fast download utility

Disclaimer

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/.

See the aria2 Online Manual (Russian translation, Portuguese translation) to learn how to use aria2.

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 the 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 chunk more than piece size to reduce the request overhead. It also supports pipelined requests with piece size.

  • BitTorrent Local Peer Discovery

  • Rename/change the directory 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 the aria2 version: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. We will ship MINOR updates on the 15th of every month. We may skip a release if we have had no changes since the last release. The feature and documentation freeze happens 10 days before the release day (the 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.

The 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 the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/aria2/aria2.git

This will create an 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

libxml2 or Expat.

Checksum

None. Optional: OSX or libnettle or libgcrypt or OpenSSL or Windows (see note)

gzip, deflate in HTTP

zlib

Async DNS

C-Ares

Firefox3/Chromium cookie

libsqlite3

XML-RPC

libxml2 or Expat.

JSON-RPC over WebSocket

libnettle or libgcrypt or OpenSSL

Note

libxml2 has precedence over Expat if both libraries are installed. If you prefer Expat, run configure with --without-libxml2.

Note

On Apple OSX, OS-level SSL/TLS support will be preferred. Hence neither GnuTLS nor OpenSSL is 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 is required on that platform. If you'd like to disable this behavior, run configure with --without-wintls.

Note

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 md5 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.

To enable async DNS support, you need c-ares.

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 the C++11 standard. The current source code requires a 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.

To build aria2 from the source package, you need the 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 a git repository, you have to install the following packages to get autoconf macros:

  • libxml2-dev

  • libcppunit-dev

  • autoconf

  • automake

  • autotools-dev

  • autopoint

  • libtool

And run the following command to generate configure script and other files necessary to build the program:

$ autoreconf -i

Also, you need Sphinx to build the 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 to run configure script:

$ ./configure

To build statically linked aria2, use ARIA2_STATIC=yes command-line option:

$ ./configure ARIA2_STATIC=yes

After configuration is done, run make to compile the program:

$ make

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 supplying the path 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:

$ ./configure --with-ca-bundle='/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt'
$ make

Without --with-ca-bundle option, you will encounter the error when accessing HTTPS servers because the certificate cannot be verified without the CA bundle. In such a case, you can specify the CA bundle file using aria2's --ca-certificate option. If you don't have the CA bundle file installed, then the last resort is to 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/share/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:

$ make check

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 using Dockerfile.mingw. See Dockerfile.mingw how to build a binary. If you cannot use Dockerfile, then continue to read the 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 to lower our own development cost, we provide an 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 the 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 a 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 a 64bit binary do this:

$ HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32 ./mingw-config

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 r21e should compile aria2 without errors.

android-config script is a configure script wrapper for Android build. We use it to create an 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 r21e. $NDK should point to the directory to Android 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 building the documentation. aria2 man pages will be build when you run make if they are not up-to-date. You can also build an HTML version of the aria2 man page by make html. The HTML version manual is also available 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, the file name is the value of "name" key. Otherwise, the 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 directory structure 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.

DHT

aria2 supports mainline compatible DHT. By default, the routing table for IPv4 DHT is saved to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/aria2/dht.dat 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 messages after selective download completes.

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 that 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 a static library, use --enable-static configure option as well. See libaria2 documentation to know how to use API.

References