Driven by performance.
Maintained by community.
Learn about the heritage, mission, and the global efforts backing the development of the world's most versatile command-line download manager.
What is aria2?
Originally developed by Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa and launched in 2006, aria2 was created to solve a complex networking problem: how to download files from multiple servers and distinct protocols (HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink) simultaneously.
By segmenting downloads and retrieving different pieces from various connections concurrently, aria2 is designed to extract maximum transfer speeds from any high-speed link. Written in lightweight C++, it was engineered to keep resource footprints minimal—using as little as 4MiB to 9MiB of RAM even during heavy workloads.
Our Mission
We believe that high-performance developer tools and utilities should be a public, open-source good. Our goal is to provide a clean, modern, and easily navigable documentation portal for aria2, making the utility accessible to terminal beginners and automation experts alike.
Privacy First
aria2 operates entirely on your local machine. It collects no files, stores no logs, and runs 100% offline by default.
Community Led
This documentation portal is supported by the open-source community to supplement the official repositories with helpful templates, tools, and guides.
Project Status & Development
aria2 is released under the permissive GNU General Public License (GPLv2 or later) and is actively developed on GitHub. It forms the backbone of numerous package managers, automated backup pipelines, custom media downloaders (like yt-dlp integration), and third-party desktop Web GUIs globally.
You can participate in the project's development, file bug reports, or join discussions on the official aria2 GitHub repository.