Slow downloading on corporate proxies? Try aria2!

Disclosure

This is for if you have troubles downloading large files while on a company network, or want to download files faster using Linux or Mac.

Steps

1). Download aria2

  • Through brew: brew install aria2
  • Other systems: https://aria2.github.io/
  • Ubuntu Example: Downloading with Ubuntu

2). cd to your downloads directory.

3). Run the following command:

aria2c --file-allocation=none -c -x 10 -s 10 $URL

4). Replace $URL with the download URL of the file you are trying to pull.

  • On the corporate network, downloading the docker for mac was taking upwards of an hour.
  • Downloading with aria2c:

The download was much quicker due to multi-threaded downloads! 😄

Shoutouts

Credit to Aria2 for an awesome downloading tool!

Credit to hmj6jmh on StackOverflow for the solution they posted to "How to make wget faster or multithreading?" which helped me solve my frustration downloading while on corporate networks.

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