How to Create Download Manager in Python
How to Create Download Manager in Python
This article demonstrate that " How to Create Download Manager in Python" .
A Download Manager is basically a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading stand alone files from internet. Here, we are going to create a simple Download Manager with the help of threads in Python. Using multi-threading a file can be downloaded in the form of chunks simultaneously from different threads. To implement this, we are going to create simple command line tool which accepts the URL of the file and then downloads it.
Prerequisites :
- A computer machine with windows. - Python already installed in system.
Build a Set-up :
We need to download the mentioned packages from command prompt.
1. Click package: Click is a Python package for creating beautiful command line interfaces with as little code as necessary. It's the Command Line Interface Creation Kit.
pip install click2. Requests package: In this tool, we are going to download a file based on the URL(HTTP addresses). Requests is an HTTP Library written in Python which allows you to send HTTP requests. You can add headers, form data, multi-part files, and parameters with simple Python dictionaries and access the response data in the same way.pip install requests
3. Threading package: To work with threads we need threading package.
pip install threading
The above error is complaining that it can't find this lib, which makes sense. Because thisthreadingis already in python's standard library, You don't need to manually install it.We can write it from the command line. Try this: python -c 'import' threading . If that doesn't give you an error, then we're fine.
Implementation :
Note: The program has been split into parts to make it easy to understand.
# Importing the required packages
import click
import requests
import threading
# The below code is used for each chunk of file handled by each thread for downloading
# the content from specified location to storage
def Handler(start, end, url, filename):
# specify the starting and ending of the file
headers = {'Range': 'bytes=%d-%d' % (start, end)}
# request the specified part and get into variable
r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True)
# open the file and write the content of the html page
# into file.
with open(filename, "r+b") as f:
f.seek(start)
var = f.tell()
f.write(r.content)
Now we are going to implement the actual functionality of in the download_file function :-
- The first step is to decorate the function with click.command() so that we can add command line arguments. We can also give options for respective commands.
- For our implementation upon entering command --help, we are going to display the options that can be used. In our program there are two options that can be used. One is number_of_threads and the other is name. By default number_of_threads is taken as 4. To change it, we can specify while running the program.
- name option is given so that we can give our own name to the file that is going to be downloaded. The arguments for the function can be specified using click.argument().
- For our program we need to give the URL of the file we want to download.
@click.command(help="It downloads the specified file with specified name")
@click.option('--number_of_threads',default=4, help="No of Threads")
@click.option('--name',type=click.Path(),help="Name of the file with extension")
@click.argument('url_of_file',type=click.Path())
@click.pass_context
def download_file(ctx,url_of_file,name,number_of_threads):
r = requests.head(url_of_file)
if name:
file_name = name
else:
file_name = url_of_file.split('/')[-1]
try:
file_size = int(r.headers['content-length'])
except:
print ("Invalid URL")
return
- In this above "download_file" function we first check for the name. If the name is not given then use the name from url.
- Next step is to connect to the URL and Get the content and size of the content.
Now ,create a file with size of the content :-
part = int(file_size) / number_of_threads
fp = open(file_name, "w")
fp.write('%uFFFD' * file_size)
fp.close()
Now we create Threads and pass the Handler function which has the main functionality :-
for i in range(number_of_threads):
start = part * i
end = start + part
# create a Thread with start and end locations
t = threading.Thread(target=Handler, kwargs={'start': start, 'end': end, 'url': url_of_file, 'filename': file_name})
t.setDaemon(True)
t.start()
Finally join the threads and call the download_file function from main :-
main_thread = threading.current_thread()
for t in threading.enumerate():
if t is main_thread:
continue
t.join()
print(" %s downloaded " % file_name )
if __name__ == '__main__':
download_file(obj={})
So the coding part is complete, now we can run our .py file with the following command :
python file_name.py --help
This command shows the Usage of the click command tool and options that the tool can accepts.
General Command to download anything :
python file_name.py --number_of_threads --name=file_name url_of_file
Below is the sample command where we try to download an jpg image file from a URL and also gave a name and number_of_threads :-
Now I can see the downloaded image in my cppsecrets folder in my pc :
So finally, a Download Manager is created which is basically a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading stand alone files from internet. Now we can download any file from this download manager via the target download file url .
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