 Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be looking at a download utility called ARIA, or ARIA2 in this particular case. So, as you probably know, you can use WGet, our curl, our two common programs that are probably on your system already for downloading files from the internet. In the past, I also talked about Axl, which is also a great utility. But today we're going to be looking at another program called ARIA. And why would you want to use ARIA over WGet or curl? WGet and curl are so common on systems. In most cases, you're probably going to want to use them if you're writing a script or something. But ARIA has abilities such as Axl. As I mentioned in the past, Axl, what it allows you to do is make multiple connections to a server or multiple servers to speed up your downloads. So, let's say you want to download a Linux ISO from a website and they have multiple mirrors. You can actually connect to multiples because usually there's a limit on download speeds from the server. So, let's say your download rate at home, you're getting like 80 megabits per second. Well, the server might only give you like five downloads because they don't want to overload their servers. Well, you can hit multiple servers and download the same file from it and get faster speeds. Well, ARIA lets you do that, too. ARIA has one advantage over Axl in that it also allows you to download torrents and magnet links for torrents. So, let's go ahead and just start looking at ARIA. If you are on a Debian-based system, you can use apt, apt2, aptget, whatever your package manager is. And you can search for ARIA. We'll say ARIA 2 in this case. And as you can see, ARIA 2 is listed here. And with the I here through apt2, it shows that it's already installed on my system. But use your package manager to install it on your system. Once it's installed, at least on Debian SID here, the command is actually ARIA 2C once it's installed. And at this point, you can just give it a URL to a file to download. So, in this case, here's a link to an image of tux that I have on my server. Boom. And it downloaded that file. You can see right there. I can say file and tux. And you can see that that's a PNG image right there. 256 by 256. It's just a little image from my website. Now, to download the same file, here I have the same thing. Let's clear the screen here on the same command. But I've made a tiny URL for it. So, I hit enter here. It downloads it. And it gave it the name that it had right there, the original name. Or actually, that's not the same file. It's a different file. Anyway, but let's say you wanted to give it a specific name. So, even though I gave it a tiny URL, it still redirected and grabbed the original name. But sometimes servers don't give you the proper extension and might download in some sort of name that doesn't have the right extension or the final name. Or you just want to name it something in particular. The way you do this is, here's the same command, aria2c, that URL. But I can do dash lowercase o and I'll call this tux2.png. And now I have downloaded it. And you can see right here it shows up as tux2.png. If I list out these files with the size, you can see that this file here is 260k. And this one here is the same because they are the same file. Let's go ahead and clear the screen there. Now, as I mentioned, it allows you to do something such as axl. So axl, again, I can do axl dash n and give it a number such as five. And I can give it a single server connection. So here's an ISO to linuxmit and axl will start making five connections to that single server and download it. Well, you can do the same thing with aria. So here we'll go aria2. But instead of dash n, we're going to do dash x and we'll say, in this case, five. And I can do that and we'll actually make five connections to that server to speed up. I actually prefer the output of axl for this because it gives you a little more I just like the output the way it's showing you the speeds and stuff like that as far as what it's downloading. Now, connecting to a single server like that multiple times might give you extra speed, but it's putting a lot more stress on that single server. And it also might get you booted if you make two connections. So another option you can do is something like this. Let me just highlight and copy and paste this. I can go like this. So there's the original image there at one mirror. But I can also separate by spaces here, give it another mirror and a third mirror. And now it should start using all three of those mirrors to download that single file, which should give you better speeds than it would if you were just connecting to a single server because you're splitting up the download for multiple servers, not bogging down those servers. And it's a preferred way to do if you're going to do this. I'll control C to kill that. Now, another option is let me list out files here and you can see I have a torrent file that I've downloaded for peppermint linux. So I can just say aria to C and give it that local torrent file and it will start downloading it just like you would any torrent file. But another option would be to do something like this. So I'll kill that. Here is aria and I'm going to point it, let's clear the screen, to a URL that is a torrent on the ubuntu website. I can do that. It's going to grab that torrent file and then actually start downloading the torrent. I'm getting errors here. Let's see if it gets going. This is from my notes that I've made a while ago. So that torrent file may not be up to date. But that's how you would do it. I'll go ahead and control C to kill that. Maybe. There we go. Let's clear the screen again. Now, you can also give it magnet links. So again, aria to C and I can give it a magnet link. So let's go ahead and get ourselves a magnet link here. Actually, I have one in my history here. Let me go ahead and just magnet. So this is just another linux distro, a magnet link to it for the raspberry pie. It's just one that I just searched for and found and there you go. Next cloud pie and now it is downloading that file and using that magnet link to download that distro. So you can give it direct links to magnet links, which is very useful for doing something like this. You can pull magnet link from a website and just start downloading this. And of course, torrents are a preferred method for a lot of linux distros to download files because it doesn't bog down their servers because you're using the community to download. One more thing I want to show you in aria here is I actually have a file called download.list. You can call this whatever you want. It doesn't matter the extension, everything. But if I was to cat it out, you can see it's just a list of files. Some of them are direct ISOs. There's a torrent file in here, another ISO, another ISO. And this one is a link to a torrent file, another link to a torrent file. Yep. So we got a mixture in there. And what you can do is you can give aria-i option and give it that file name. So I'll say download.list. Again, it's just a plain text file. And it's going to go through and download each one of those files. And it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that they're mixed in there. Like I said, there's torrent files in there. There's ISOs. I don't have a magnet link in there, but should be able to add that in there. But that would be one way if you had a bunch of files in a list of download, give it to aria, and it will just one by one download them. And again, you could also, you know, tell it to use multiple connections if you want to speed that up. Again, not a case with the torrent file, because that's your using multiple connections. Anyway, that is it. I just want to give you a look at this very useful tool. I've used it in a number of my scripts for automating downloads of certain things from websites. So that's aria. Should be in your repositories, aria2, aria2c. Just search for aria and see what comes up in your repositories. I do thank you for watching. As always, please visit filmsbychris.com. That's Chris the K. There's a link in the description. Also, check me out on patreon.com forward slash mail x1000. If you want to support, there's also a link on my website under support for Paypal. You can support me either of those ways. I do thank you for watching. And as always, I hope that you have a great day.