Fast CLI download accelerator with multi-threaded HTTP/S streams and torrent support.

DL is a modern, lightweight, high-performance CLI downloader and accelerator written in Rust. dl speeds up downloads by utilizing multiple concurrent connections for HTTP streams and supports downloading directly from BitTorrent (including magnet links and .torrent files) with an interactive file selector.

• HTTP/HTTPS Download Acceleration: Downloads files using concurrent range requests split into multiple chunks, dramatically speeding up HTTP/HTTPS transfers.
• Dynamic & Adaptive Worker Scaling: Automatically optimizes the number of concurrent connections when not specified. It starts with a base set of workers and progressively increases or decreases the count based on real-time speed feedback, maximizing bandwidth while avoiding congestion or rate limits.
• Dynamic Protocol Negotiation & Connection Multiplexing: Native support for ALPN protocol negotiation and advanced stream-level connection multiplexing via HTTP/2 with adaptive flow control, drastically reducing handshake overhead.
• BitTorrent & Magnet Link Support: Seamlessly downloads torrents or magnet links.
• Interactive File Selection: For multi-file torrents, dl interactively prompts you to choose which specific files you want to download.
• Resumable Streams: Automatically saves transfer state so you can pause and resume downloads without losing progress.

You can install dl using Homebrew via a custom tap:

brew install gkpln3/tap/dl

Or tap the repository first and then install:

brew tap gkpln3/tap
brew install dl

For compiling from source, you must have Rust and Cargo installed on your machine.

If you clone this repository, you cannot run cargo install directly from the workspace root folder because it is a virtual cargo workspace. Instead, you need to target the CLI package specifically.

Run the following command from the project root directory:

cargo install --path dl-cli

This compiles dl in release mode and installs the executable directly to your local Cargo bin directory (usually ~/.cargo/bin). Make sure this directory is in your shell's PATH to run dl from anywhere!

Note: Performance can vary based on network conditions, server capabilities, and the specific file being downloaded. Your mileage may vary, but dl consistently outperforms single-threaded downloaders and often exceeds the performance of other multi-threaded utilities. dl's dynamic connection manager also helps it adapt to varying network conditions, providing optimal performance without manual tuning.

dl [OPTIONS] <SOURCE>

• -o, --output <OUTPUT>: Output file for HTTP downloads, or output directory for torrents.
• -j, --connections <CONNECTIONS>: Number of concurrent HTTP range workers (dynamic/auto-scaling by default).
• --chunk-size <CHUNK_SIZE>: HTTP chunk size (supports plain bytes, or suffix units like K, M, G) (default: 2M).
• --no-resume: Disable resumable inline metadata (state saving).
• --overwrite: Force-replace an existing output path.
• --torrent: Force treat an HTTP/HTTPS source URL as a torrent file.
• -h, --help: Print help information.
• -V, --version: Print version information.

Fast download using the dynamic/auto-scaling connection manager:

dl https://example.com/large-file.zip

Set a fixed number of concurrent threads (e.g. 16 workers):

dl -j 16 https://example.com/large-file.zip

dl "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:..."

dl ./ubuntu-desktop.torrent

You can benchmark dl against wget and axel using the provided benchmark.py script in the root directory. The script compiles dl in release mode, runs each download utility inside a pseudo-terminal (to capture active progress updates), measures their average transfer speed over a set duration.

Make sure you have wget and axel installed on your system (e.g., via Homebrew on macOS):

brew install wget axel

To run a timed benchmark (by default, 30 seconds per downloader configuration) on the default Ubuntu desktop and Apple restore IPSW files:

./benchmark.py --duration 30

You can customize the connection counts to test:

./benchmark.py --duration 30 --connections 8,16,32

To run a full download benchmark (Warning: these files are 6.5 GB and 11.3 GB, respectively!):

./benchmark.py --full

For more options (like benchmarking a custom URL), run:

./benchmark.py --help

This project is licensed under MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.