Speed Up Your File Downloads Using Aria2 in Linux

    Aria2 is a Open Source, Light weight, Multi-source, Cross-platform and Multi-protocol command line download manager available in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX platforms. It supports wide variety of protocols including HTTP(S), FTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink. With Aria2, you can download any file from multiple protocols and sources with maximum bandwidth utilization to accelerate user's download experience.

Features:

• Lightweight as it doesn't consume CPU memory and CPU time.
• Supports Multi-connection downloads.
• A BitTorrent client with all features.
• Supports Metalink.
• A good alternative for wget and curl.

Fixes in Latest Version : Aria2 1.18.1

• LibsslTLSContext: Remove weak cipher suite
• AppleTLS: Enable --certificate
• util::percentEncodeMini: Fix regression bug removed unsignedness
• srange-based for around std::string is convenient but several functions depend unsigned char for correctness and readability.
• Log exception; throw error if loading private key and/or certificate failed
• Provide internal ARC4 implementation
• Now you can build bittorrent support without without external libraries, meaning you can skip libnettle, libgmp, libgcrypt, GnuTLS and OpenSSL on OSX (for now).
• Internal implementation of DHKeyExchange
• PKCS12 support in --certificate and --rpc-certificate options.
• Add --disable-ssl configure option and many more...

Installation

Add the PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:t-tujikawa/ppa

Update local repository.

sudo apt-get update

Install the package.

sudo apt-get install aria2

Basic Usage of Aria2

1. File Download From Web

You can use following syntax to download only one file from the internet.

Syntax:

# aria2c [URL]

Example:

# aria2c http://releases.ubuntu.com/saucy/ubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso

To download multiple files, you can mention two URLs as arguments as follows:

# aria2c [URL-1]  [URL-2]

2. Adjusting the Connections Per Download

You can download files from their sources using two connections to speed up the process using -x option as follows:

Example:

# aria2c -x 2 http://releases.ubuntu.com/saucy/ubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso

3. BitTorrent Download

You can download the torrent files with following command:

Example:

# aria2c http://releases.ubuntu.com/saucy/ubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

4. Downloading From Multiple Sources Mentioned in Text File

Yes, you can download multiple files by reading multiple URLs written in a text file.

Syntax:

# aria2c -i [Text-File-Name]

Example:

# aria2c -i DwldList.txt

5. Limiting the Maximum Download Speed

You can restrict the bandwidth usage of a download with the option -max-download-limit as follows:

Example:

# aria2c -max-download-limit=200K http://releases.ubuntu.com/saucy/ubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso

6. Using Two Sources For a Download

You can download same file from two distinct sources as follows:

Example:

aria2c http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.7/amd64/iso-cd/debian-6.0.7-amd64-netinst.iso ftp://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.7/amd64/iso-cd/debian-6.0.7-amd64-netinst.iso

That's all about Aria2 Download Manager. For more details, you can always refer to the manual page of Aria2 by executing man aria2c command.