How to download a file over HTTP?

Question

I have a small utility that I use to download an MP3 file from a website on a schedule and then builds/updates a podcast XML file which I've added to iTunes.

The text processing that creates/updates the XML file is written in Python. However, I use wget inside a Windows .bat file to download the actual MP3 file. I would prefer to have the entire utility written in Python.

I struggled to find a way to actually download the file in Python, thus why I resorted to using wget.

So, how do I download the file using Python?

Answer 1

One more, using urlretrieve:

import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3", "mp3.mp3")

(for Python 2 use import urllib and urllib.urlretrieve)

Answer 2

Use urllib.request.urlopen():

import urllib.request
with urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.example.com/') as f:
    html = f.read().decode('utf-8')

This is the most basic way to use the library, minus any error handling. You can also do more complex stuff such as changing headers.

On Python 2, the method is in urllib2:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/')
html = response.read()

Answer 3

In 2012, use the python requests library

>>> import requests
>>> 
>>> url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"
>>> r = requests.get(url)
>>> print len(r.content)
10485760

You can run pip install requests to get it.

Requests has many advantages over the alternatives because the API is much simpler. This is especially true if you have to do authentication. urllib and urllib2 are pretty unintuitive and painful in this case.

---

2015-12-30

People have expressed admiration for the progress bar. It's cool, sure. There are several off-the-shelf solutions now, including tqdm:

from tqdm import tqdm
import requests

url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)

with open("10MB", "wb") as handle:
    for data in tqdm(response.iter_content()):
        handle.write(data)

This is essentially the implementation @kvance described 30 months ago.

Answer 4

import urllib2
mp3file = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3")
with open('test.mp3','wb') as output:
  output.write(mp3file.read())

The wb in open('test.mp3','wb') opens a file (and erases any existing file) in binary mode so you can save data with it instead of just text.

Answer 5

Python 3

• urllib.request.urlopen

  import urllib.request
  response = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.example.com/')
  html = response.read()
  

• urllib.request.urlretrieve

  import urllib.request
  urllib.request.urlretrieve('http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3', 'mp3.mp3')
  

  Note: According to the documentation, urllib.request.urlretrieve is a "legacy interface" and "might become deprecated in the future" (thanks gerrit)

Python 2

• urllib2.urlopen (thanks Corey)

  import urllib2
  response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/')
  html = response.read()
  

• urllib.urlretrieve (thanks PabloG)

  import urllib
  urllib.urlretrieve('http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3', 'mp3.mp3')
  

Answer 6

import os,requests
def download(url):
    get_response = requests.get(url,stream=True)
    file_name  = url.split("/")[-1]
    with open(file_name, 'wb') as f:
        for chunk in get_response.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
            if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
                f.write(chunk)


download("https://example.com/example.jpg")

Answer 7

use wget module:

import wget
wget.download('url')

Answer 8

An improved version of the PabloG code for Python 2/3:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import ( division, absolute_import, print_function, unicode_literals )

import sys, os, tempfile, logging

if sys.version_info >= (3,):
    import urllib.request as urllib2
    import urllib.parse as urlparse
else:
    import urllib2
    import urlparse

def download_file(url, dest=None):
    """ 
    Download and save a file specified by url to dest directory,
    """
    u = urllib2.urlopen(url)

    scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment = urlparse.urlsplit(url)
    filename = os.path.basename(path)
    if not filename:
        filename = 'downloaded.file'
    if dest:
        filename = os.path.join(dest, filename)

    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        meta = u.info()
        meta_func = meta.getheaders if hasattr(meta, 'getheaders') else meta.get_all
        meta_length = meta_func("Content-Length")
        file_size = None
        if meta_length:
            file_size = int(meta_length[0])
        print("Downloading: {0} Bytes: {1}".format(url, file_size))

        file_size_dl = 0
        block_sz = 8192
        while True:
            buffer = u.read(block_sz)
            if not buffer:
                break

            file_size_dl += len(buffer)
            f.write(buffer)

            status = "{0:16}".format(file_size_dl)
            if file_size:
                status += "   [{0:6.2f}%]".format(file_size_dl * 100 / file_size)
            status += chr(13)
            print(status, end="")
        print()

    return filename

if __name__ == "__main__":  # Only run if this file is called directly
    print("Testing with 10MB download")
    url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"
    filename = download_file(url)
    print(filename)

Answer 9

Simple yet Python 2 & Python 3 compatible way comes with six library:

from six.moves import urllib
urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3", "mp3.mp3")

Answer 10

Following are the most commonly used calls for downloading files in python:

1. urllib.urlretrieve ('url_to_file', file_name)

2. urllib2.urlopen('url_to_file')

3. requests.get(url)

4. wget.download('url', file_name)

Note: urlopen and urlretrieve are found to perform relatively bad with downloading large files (size > 500 MB). requests.get stores the file in-memory until download is complete.

Answer 11

Wrote wget library in pure Python just for this purpose. It is pumped up urlretrieve with these features as of version 2.0.

Answer 12

In python3 you can use urllib3 and shutil libraires. Download them by using pip or pip3 (Depending whether python3 is default or not)

pip3 install urllib3 shutil

Then run this code

import urllib.request
import shutil

url = "http://www.somewebsite.com/something.pdf"
output_file = "save_this_name.pdf"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response, open(output_file, 'wb') as out_file:
    shutil.copyfileobj(response, out_file)

Note that you download urllib3 but use urllib in code

Answer 13

I agree with Corey, urllib2 is more complete than urllib and should likely be the module used if you want to do more complex things, but to make the answers more complete, urllib is a simpler module if you want just the basics:

import urllib
response = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3')
mp3 = response.read()

Will work fine. Or, if you don't want to deal with the "response" object you can call read() directly:

import urllib
mp3 = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3').read()

Answer 14

If you have wget installed, you can use parallel_sync.

pip install parallel_sync

from parallel_sync import wget
urls = ['http://something.png', 'http://somthing.tar.gz', 'http://somthing.zip']
wget.download('/tmp', urls)
# or a single file:
wget.download('/tmp', urls[0], filenames='x.zip', extract=True)

Doc: https://pythonhosted.org/parallel_sync/pages/examples.html

This is pretty powerful. It can download files in parallel, retry upon failure , and it can even download files on a remote machine.

Answer 15

You can use python requests

import os
import requests


outfile = os.path.join(SAVE_DIR, file_name)
response = requests.get(URL, stream=True)
with open(outfile,'wb') as output:
  output.write(response.content)

You can use shutil

import os
import requests
import shutil
 
outfile = os.path.join(SAVE_DIR, file_name)
response = requests.get(url, stream = True)
with open(outfile, 'wb') as f:
  shutil.copyfileobj(response.content, f)

• If you are downloading from restricted url, don't forget to include access token in headers

Answer 16

You can get the progress feedback with urlretrieve as well:

def report(blocknr, blocksize, size):
    current = blocknr*blocksize
    sys.stdout.write("\r{0:.2f}%".format(100.0*current/size))

def downloadFile(url):
    print "\n",url
    fname = url.split('/')[-1]
    print fname
    urllib.urlretrieve(url, fname, report)

Answer 17

Just for the sake of completeness, it is also possible to call any program for retrieving files using the subprocess package. Programs dedicated to retrieving files are more powerful than Python functions like urlretrieve. For example, wget can download directories recursively (-R), can deal with FTP, redirects, HTTP proxies, can avoid re-downloading existing files (-nc), and aria2 can do multi-connection downloads which can potentially speed up your downloads.

import subprocess
subprocess.check_output(['wget', '-O', 'example_output_file.html', 'https://example.com'])

In Jupyter Notebook, one can also call programs directly with the ! syntax:

!wget -O example_output_file.html https://example.com

Answer 18

Use Python Requests in 5 lines

import requests as req

remote_url = 'http://www.example.com/sound.mp3'
local_file_name = 'sound.mp3'

data = req.get(remote_url)

# Save file data to local copy
with open(local_file_name, 'wb')as file:
    file.write(data.content)

Now do something with the local copy of the remote file

Answer 19

I wrote the following, which works in vanilla Python 2 or Python 3.

---

import sys
try:
    import urllib.request
    python3 = True
except ImportError:
    import urllib2
    python3 = False


def progress_callback_simple(downloaded,total):
    sys.stdout.write(
        "\r" +
        (len(str(total))-len(str(downloaded)))*" " + str(downloaded) + "/%d"%total +
        " [%3.2f%%]"%(100.0*float(downloaded)/float(total))
    )
    sys.stdout.flush()

def download(srcurl, dstfilepath, progress_callback=None, block_size=8192):
    def _download_helper(response, out_file, file_size):
        if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(0,file_size)
        if block_size == None:
            buffer = response.read()
            out_file.write(buffer)

            if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(file_size,file_size)
        else:
            file_size_dl = 0
            while True:
                buffer = response.read(block_size)
                if not buffer: break

                file_size_dl += len(buffer)
                out_file.write(buffer)

                if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(file_size_dl,file_size)
    with open(dstfilepath,"wb") as out_file:
        if python3:
            with urllib.request.urlopen(srcurl) as response:
                file_size = int(response.getheader("Content-Length"))
                _download_helper(response,out_file,file_size)
        else:
            response = urllib2.urlopen(srcurl)
            meta = response.info()
            file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0])
            _download_helper(response,out_file,file_size)

import traceback
try:
    download(
        "https://geometrian.com/data/programming/projects/glLib/glLib%20Reloaded%200.5.9/0.5.9.zip",
        "output.zip",
        progress_callback_simple
    )
except:
    traceback.print_exc()
    input()

---

Notes:

• Supports a "progress bar" callback.
• Download is a 4 MB test .zip from my website.

Answer 20

If speed matters to you, I made a small performance test for the modules urllib and wget, and regarding wget I tried once with status bar and once without. I took three different 500MB files to test with (different files- to eliminate the chance that there is some caching going on under the hood). Tested on debian machine, with python2.

First, these are the results (they are similar in different runs):

$ python wget_test.py 
urlretrive_test : starting
urlretrive_test : 6.56
==============
wget_no_bar_test : starting
wget_no_bar_test : 7.20
==============
wget_with_bar_test : starting
100% [......................................................................] 541335552 / 541335552
wget_with_bar_test : 50.49
==============

The way I performed the test is using "profile" decorator. This is the full code:

import wget
import urllib
import time
from functools import wraps

def profile(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def inner(*args):
        print func.__name__, ": starting"
        start = time.time()
        ret = func(*args)
        end = time.time()
        print func.__name__, ": {:.2f}".format(end - start)
        return ret
    return inner

url1 = 'http://host.com/500a.iso'
url2 = 'http://host.com/500b.iso'
url3 = 'http://host.com/500c.iso'

def do_nothing(*args):
    pass

@profile
def urlretrive_test(url):
    return urllib.urlretrieve(url)

@profile
def wget_no_bar_test(url):
    return wget.download(url, out='/tmp/', bar=do_nothing)

@profile
def wget_with_bar_test(url):
    return wget.download(url, out='/tmp/')

urlretrive_test(url1)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

wget_no_bar_test(url2)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

wget_with_bar_test(url3)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

urllib seems to be the fastest

Answer 21

Source code can be:

import urllib
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://diveintopython.org/")
htmlSource = sock.read()                            
sock.close()                                        
print htmlSource  

Answer 22

You can use PycURL on Python 2 and 3.

import pycurl

FILE_DEST = 'pycurl.html'
FILE_SRC = 'http://pycurl.io/'

with open(FILE_DEST, 'wb') as f:
    c = pycurl.Curl()
    c.setopt(c.URL, FILE_SRC)
    c.setopt(c.WRITEDATA, f)
    c.perform()
    c.close()

Answer 23

urlretrieve and requests.get are simple, however the reality not. I have fetched data for couple sites, including text and images, the above two probably solve most of the tasks. but for a more universal solution I suggest the use of urlopen. As it is included in Python 3 standard library, your code could run on any machine that run Python 3 without pre-installing site-package

import urllib.request
url_request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=headers)
url_connect = urllib.request.urlopen(url_request)

#remember to open file in bytes mode
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
    while True:
        buffer = url_connect.read(buffer_size)
        if not buffer: break

        #an integer value of size of written data
        data_wrote = f.write(buffer)

#you could probably use with-open-as manner
url_connect.close()

This answer provides a solution to HTTP 403 Forbidden when downloading file over http using Python. I have tried only requests and urllib modules, the other module may provide something better, but this is the one I used to solve most of the problems.

Answer 24

Late answer, but for python>=3.6 you can use:

import dload
dload.save(url)

---

Install dload with:

pip3 install dload

Answer 25

This may be a little late, But I saw pabloG's code and couldn't help adding a os.system('cls') to make it look AWESOME! Check it out :

    import urllib2,os

    url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"

    file_name = url.split('/')[-1]
    u = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    f = open(file_name, 'wb')
    meta = u.info()
    file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0])
    print "Downloading: %s Bytes: %s" % (file_name, file_size)
    os.system('cls')
    file_size_dl = 0
    block_sz = 8192
    while True:
        buffer = u.read(block_sz)
        if not buffer:
            break

        file_size_dl += len(buffer)
        f.write(buffer)
        status = r"%10d  [%3.2f%%]" % (file_size_dl, file_size_dl * 100. / file_size)
        status = status + chr(8)*(len(status)+1)
        print status,

    f.close()

If running in an environment other than Windows, you will have to use something other then 'cls'. In MAC OS X and Linux it should be 'clear'.

Answer 26

New Api urllib3 based implementation

>>> import urllib3
>>> http = urllib3.PoolManager()
>>> r = http.request('GET', 'your_url_goes_here')
>>> r.status
   200
>>> r.data
   *****Response Data****

More info: https://pypi.org/project/urllib3/

Answer 27

Options like:

1. wget.download('url', file_name),
2. urllib.urlretrieve ('url_to_file', file_name),

Have the flaw that it's not possible to setup User Agent. That may cause issues while downloading the files from external sites (they're blocking particular User Agents so you have to pass a custom one).

I found urllib3 much handy.

import urllib3

resp = urllib3.request('GET', 'http://www.example.com/sound.mp3', preload_content=False, headers={'User-Agent': 'Customer User Agent If Needed'})

with open('sound.mp3', 'wb') as f:
    for chunk in resp.stream(65536):
        f.write(chunk)

resp.release_conn()

Answer 28

I wanted do download all the files from a webpage. I tried wget but it was failing so I decided for the Python route and I found this thread.

After reading it, I have made a little command line application, soupget, expanding on the excellent answers of PabloG and Stan and adding some useful options.

It uses BeatifulSoup to collect all the URLs of the page and then download the ones with the desired extension(s). Finally it can download multiple files in parallel.

Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import (division, absolute_import, print_function, unicode_literals)
import sys, os, argparse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# --- insert Stan's script here ---
# if sys.version_info >= (3,): 
#...
#...
# def download_file(url, dest=None): 
#...
#...

# --- new stuff ---
def collect_all_url(page_url, extensions):
    """
    Recovers all links in page_url checking for all the desired extensions
    """
    conn = urllib2.urlopen(page_url)
    html = conn.read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
    links = soup.find_all('a')

    results = []    
    for tag in links:
        link = tag.get('href', None)
        if link is not None: 
            for e in extensions:
                if e in link:
                    # Fallback for badly defined links
                    # checks for missing scheme or netloc
                    if bool(urlparse.urlparse(link).scheme) and bool(urlparse.urlparse(link).netloc):
                        results.append(link)
                    else:
                        new_url=urlparse.urljoin(page_url,link)                        
                        results.append(new_url)
    return results

if __name__ == "__main__":  # Only run if this file is called directly
    # Command line arguments
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description='Download all files from a webpage.')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-u', '--url', 
        help='Page url to request')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-e', '--ext', 
        nargs='+',
        help='Extension(s) to find')    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-d', '--dest', 
        default=None,
        help='Destination where to save the files')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-p', '--par', 
        action='store_true', default=False, 
        help="Turns on parallel download")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    # Recover files to download
    all_links = collect_all_url(args.url, args.ext)

    # Download
    if not args.par:
        for l in all_links:
            try:
                filename = download_file(l, args.dest)
                print(l)
            except Exception as e:
                print("Error while downloading: {}".format(e))
    else:
        from multiprocessing.pool import ThreadPool
        results = ThreadPool(10).imap_unordered(
            lambda x: download_file(x, args.dest), all_links)
        for p in results:
            print(p)

An example of its usage is:

python3 soupget.py -p -e <list of extensions> -d <destination_folder> -u <target_webpage>

And an actual example if you want to see it in action:

python3 soupget.py -p -e .xlsx .pdf .csv -u https://healthdata.gov/dataset/chemicals-cosmetics

Answer 29

Another possibility is with built-in http.client:

from http import HTTPStatus, client
from shutil import copyfileobj

# using https
connection = client.HTTPSConnection("www.example.com")
with connection.request("GET", "/noise.mp3") as response:
    if response.status == HTTPStatus.OK:
        copyfileobj(response, open("noise.mp3")
    else:
        raise Exception("request needs work")

The HTTPConnection object is considered “low-level” in that it performs the desired request once and assumes the developer will subclass it or script in a way to handle the nuances of HTTP. Libraries such as requests tend to handle more special cases such as automatically following redirects and so on.

Answer 30

You can use keras.utils.get_file to do it:

from tensorflow import keras

path_to_downloaded_file = keras.utils.get_file(
    fname="file name",
    origin="https://www.linktofile.com/link/to/file",
    extract=True,
    archive_format="zip",  # downloaded file format
    cache_dir="/",  # cache and extract in current directory
)