Install aria2 on Raspberry Pi

Overview

aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol and multi-source command-line downloading utility. It supports various protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces.

Webui-aria2 is an open source web frontend for aria2, it is simple and easy-to-use.

This guide will show you how to install aria2 and webui-aria2 on Raspberry Pi.

Features

• Multi-Connection Download
  aria2 can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth. Really speeds up your download experience.

• Lightweight
  aria2 doesn’t require much memory and CPU time. When disk cache is off, the physical memory usage is typically 4MiB (normal HTTP/FTP downloads) to 9MiB (BitTorrent downloads). CPU usage in BitTorrent with download speed of 2.8MiB/sec is around 6%.

• Fully Featured BitTorrent Client
  All features you want in BitTorrent client are available: DHT, PEX, Encryption, Magnet URI, Web-Seeding, Selective Downloads, Local Peer Discovery and UDP tracker.

• Metalink Enabled
  aria2 supports The Metalink Download Description Format (aka Metalink v4), Metalink version 3 and Metalink/HTTP. Metalink offers the file verification, HTTP/FTP/SFTP/BitTorrent integration and the various configurations for language, location, OS, etc.

• Remote Control
  aria2 supports RPC interface to control the aria2 process. The supported interfaces are JSON-RPC (over HTTP and WebSocket) and XML-RPC.

Install arial2

sudo apt update
sudo apt install aria2 -y

After arial2 installed here are some examples to download a file from one or multi-source URI using arial2c command:

aria2c https://example.com/linux-distro.iso
aria2c ftp://example.com/linux-distro.iso
aria2c https://example.com/linux-distro.iso https://example.org/linux-distro.iso
aria2c https://example.com/linux-distro.torrent
aria2c linux-distro.torrent
aria2c https://example.com/linux-distro.metalink

Install webui-aria2

We also can use web-based frontend for aria2 to add, remove or view downloading tasks.

1. Run aria2 on Raspberry Pi

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

2. Download webui-aria2 from https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2
   Click “Code > Download Zip” or clone the repository.
3. Open index.html from docs folder (On Windows)
4. “Settings > Connection Settings > Enter the host”
5. Hosting webui-aria2 on Raspberry Pi (Optional)
   Host it with nginx so that we can open the downloading web anywhere