Aria2: A Feature-Rich And Flexible Command-Line Download Manager

Aria2 is an easy to use command-line download manager for Ubuntu/Linux. It supports multiple protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, BitTorrent/Magnet URI and Metalink.

Aria2 includes the following features:

• Multi-connection download (It retrieves a file from multiple sources)
• Very low CPU/RAM footprints
• Remote interface (Can be controlled using a Web UI)
• BitTorrent support (Web-seeding, Encryption, Local Peer Discovery ...)

Usage Examples:

Download a file:

aria2c https://example.com/somefile.file

Download A Torrent Using Magnet URI:

aria2c 'magnet:?xt=urn:btih:248D0A1CK08284299DE74D5C1ED359BB46717T8C'

Enable Local Peer Discovery:

aria2c --bt-enable-lpd ./ubuntu-12.10-amd64.torrent

Show The Content Of A Torrent File:

aria2c --show-files ./ubuntu-12.10-amd64.torrent

Web UI:

As I mentioned above, Aria2 supports remote interfaces (i.e. RPC interface). However, you need to install an external application to enable this feature.

Webui-Aria2 is a project which aims to provide a Web Interface for Aria2. To install Webui-Aria2, use the following commands:

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2.git

In order to enable the Aria2 Web Interface, you need to launch Aria2 with RPC support:

aria2c --enable-rpc --rpc-listen-all

Now go back to the source code that you have downloaded from Git:

cd ~/Downloads/webui-aria2/

The Webui-aria2 interface doesn't need an installation. To launch Aria2 Web Interface, simply open the index.html in your favorite browser and start downloading:

Ubuntu users can easily install Aria2 using the following PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:t-tujikawa/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install aria2