In Operation
Here’s an image of the user interface with a couple of downloads in progress. It’s very simple and easy to use.
There’s more functionality under the bonnet. Let’s take a look at the important features.
A download manager isn’t very useful if it doesn’t integrate with web browsers. Fortunately, there’s support for Firefox and Chrome extensions. It can also route all downloads to itself.
There’s torrent support too although it’s pretty basic currently.
We can change the download directory, set a speed limit, and set the number of simultaneous downloads.
What else is there?
- Background mode.
- Continue incomplete downloads from the previous session upon startup.
- Pause and restart downloads.
- A useful scheduler where we can set start and end times for downloads.
- Use basic authentication – supply username and password.
- Remote timestamp support.
- Use cookies.txt. We can import the cookies.txt file.
- Internationalization support.
Summary
We think aria2 is one of the finest CLI download managers, so it’s a great candidate to build a GUI on top.
Varia is a competent download manager. It lets you use your connection bandwidth to its full. Its feature set is not as wide as some download managers but at least it’s truly open source (unlike the feature-laden JDownloader).
Website: giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Giant Pink Robots!
License: Mozilla Public License 2.0
Varia is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary