aria2 - The ultra fast download utility

Author: Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa
Email:t-tujikawa_at_users_dot_sourceforge_dot_net

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, 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 and BitTorrent at the same time, while the data downloaded from HTTP(S)/FTP 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 http://aria2.sourceforge.net/.

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

Features

Here is a list of features:

How to get source code

We maintain the source code at Github: https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/aria2

To get the latest source code, run following command:

$ git clone git://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/aria2.git

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
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 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 an experimental SSL implementation available that is based on the native Windows SSL capabilities (Schannel). Run configure with --with-wintls to use.

Note

On Apple OSX the OS-level checksumming 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 an experimental implementation available that is based on the native Windows capabilities. Run configure with --with-wintls to use.

A user can have one of the following configurations for SSL and crypto libraries:

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.

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):

You can use libgcrypt-dev instead of nettle-dev and libgmp-dev:

You can use libssl-dev instead of libgnutls-dev, nettle-dev, libgmp-dev, libgpg-error-dev and libgcrypt-dev:

You can use libexpat1-dev instead of libxml2-dev:

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

$ autoreconf -i

Also you need Sphinx to build man page.

If you are building aria2 for Mac OS X, take a look at the make-release-os.mk GNU Make makefile.

The quickest way to build aria2 is first 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 execept 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 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 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/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 cross-compiler on Debian Linux.

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:

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:

$ 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-r9 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:

When building the above libraries, make sure that disable shared library and enable only static library. We are going to link those libraries statically.

We use zlib which comes with Android NDK, so we don't have to build it by ourselves.

android-config assumes the existence of $ANDROID_HOME environment variable which must fulfill the following conditions:

Before running android-config and android-make, $ANDOIRD_HOME environment variable must be set to point to the correct path.

After android-config, run android-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).

BitTorrrent

About filenames

The filename of the downloaded file is determined as follows:

single-file mode
If "name" key is present in .torrent file, filename is the value of "name" key. Otherwise, filename is the basename of .torrent file appended by ".file". For example, .torrent file is "test.torrrent", then filename 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 $HOME/.aria2/dht.dat and the routing table for IPv6 DHT is saved to $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 filename of .torrent file itself, not a filename 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.

netrc

netrc support is enabled by default for HTTP(S)/FTP. 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.

References