public/subjects/wget

wget

Objectives

This project objective consists on recreating some functionalities of wget using a compiled language of your choice (like C, Rust, Go or other).

These functionalities will consist in:

• The normal usage of wget: downloading a file given an URL, example: wget https://some_url.ogr/file.zip
• Downloading a single file and saving it under a different name
• Downloading and saving the file in a specific directory
• Set the download speed, limiting the rate speed of a download
• Downloading a file in background
• Downloading multiple files at the same time, by reading a file containing multiple download links asynchronously
• Main feature will be to download an entire website, mirroring a website

Introduction

Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

To see more about wget you can visit the manual by using the command man wget, or you can visit the website here.

Usage

Your program must have as arguments the link from where you want to download the file, for instance:

$ go run . https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg

The program should be able to give feedback, displaying the:

• Time that the program started: it must have the following format yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
• Status of the request. For the program to proceed to the download, it must present a response to the request as status OK (200 OK) if not, it should say which status it got and finish the operation with an error warning
• Size of the content downloaded: the content length can be presented as raw (bytes) and rounded to Mb or Gb depending on the size of the file downloaded
• Name and path of the file that is about to be saved
• A progress bar, having the following:
  • A amount of KiB or MiB (depending on the download size) that was downloaded
  • A percentage of how much was downloaded
  • Time that remains to finish the download
• Time that the download finished respecting the previous format

It should look something like this

$ go run . https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
start at 2017-10-14 03:46:06
sending request, awaiting response... status 200 OK
content size: 56370 [~0.06MB]
saving file to: ./EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
 55.05 KiB / 55.05 KiB [================================================================================================================] 100.00% 1.24 MiB/s 0s

Downloaded [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg]
finished at 2017-10-14 03:46:07

Flags

Your program should be able to handle different flags.

1. The flag -B should be handled, this flag should download a file immediately to the background and the output should be redirected to a log file. When the program containing this flag is executed it should output : Output will be written to "wget-log". Example:

$ go run . -B https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
Output will be written to "wget-log".
$ cat wget-log
start at 2017-10-14 03:46:06
sending request, awaiting response... status 200 OK
content size: 56370 [~0.06MB]
saving file to: ./EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
Downloaded [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg]
finished at 2017-10-14 03:46:07
$

2. Download a file and save it under a different name by using the flag -O followed by the name you wish to save the file, example:

$ go run . -O=meme.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
start at 2017-10-14 03:46:06
sending request, awaiting response... status 200 OK
content size: 56370 [~0.06MB]
saving file to: ./meme.jpg
 55.05 KiB / 55.05 KiB [================================================================================================================] 100.00% 1.24 MiB/s 0s

Downloaded [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg]
finished at 2017-10-14 03:46:07
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 student student 56370 ago 13 16:59 meme.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 student student 11489 ago 13 10:28 main.go

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3. It should also handle the path to where your file is going to be saved using the flag -P followed by the path to where you want to save the file, example:

$ go run . -P=~/Downloads/ -O=meme.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg
start at 2017-10-14 03:46:06
sending request, awaiting response... status 200 OK
content size: 56370 [~0.06MB]
saving file to: ~/Downloads/meme.jpg
 55.05 KiB / 55.05 KiB [================================================================================================================] 100.00% 1.24 MiB/s 0s

Downloaded [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg]
finished at 2017-10-14 03:46:07
$ ls -l ~/Downloads/meme.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 student student 56370 ago 13 16:59 /home/student/Downloads/meme.jpg

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4. The program should handle speed limit. Basically the program can control the speed of the download by using the flag --rate-limit. If you download a huge file you can limit the speed of your download, preventing the program from using the full possible bandwidth of your connection, example:

$ go run . --rate-limit=400k https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMtmPFLWkAA8CIS.jpg

This flag should accept different value types, example: k and M. So you can put the rate limit as rate-limit=200k or rate-limit=2M

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5. Downloading different files should be possible. For this the program will receive the -i flag followed by a file name that will contain all links that are to be downloaded. Example:

$ ls
download.txt   main.go
$ cat download.txt
http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/20MB.zip
http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip
$ go run . -i=download.txt
content size: [10485760, 20971520]
finished 10MB.zip
finished 20MB.zip

Download finished:  [http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/20MB.zip http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip]

The Downloads should work asynchronously, it should download both files at the same time. You are free to display what you want for this option.

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6. Mirror a website. This option should download the entire website being possible to use "part" of the website offline and for other useful reasons. For this you will have to download the website file system and save it into a folder that will have the domain name. Example: http://www.example.com, will be stored in a folder with the name www.example.com containing every file from the mirrored website. The flag should be --mirror.

The default usage of the flag will be to retrieve and parse the HTML or CSS from the given URL. This way retrieving the files that the document refers through tags. The tags that will be used for this retrieval must be a, link and img that contains attributes href and src.

You will have to implement some optional flags to go along with the --mirror flag.

Those flags will work based on Follow links. The command wget has several mechanisms that allows you to fine-tune which links it will follow. For This project you will have to implement the behavior of (note that this flags will be used in conjunction with the --mirror flag):

• Types of Files (--reject short hand -R)

this flag will have a list of file suffixes that the program will avoid downloading during the retrieval

example:

$ go run . --mirror -R=jpg,gif https://example.com

• Directory-Based Limits (--exclude short hand -X)

this flag will have a list of paths that the program will avoid to follow and retrieve. So if the URL is https://example.com and the directories are /js, /css and /assets you can avoid any path by using -X=/js,/assets. The fs will now just have /css.

example:

$ go run . --mirror -X=/assets,/css https://example.com

Hint

You can take a look into the html package for some help.
Try the real flags from the wget command to better understand their usage.

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This project will help you learn about:

• GNU Wget
• HTTP
• FTP
• Algorithms (recursion)
• Mirror websites
  • Follow links
• File system (fs)