Parfive

Parfive is a small library for downloading files, its objective is to provide a simple API for queuing files for download and then providing excellent feedback to the user about the in progress downloads. It also aims to provide a clear interface for inspecting any failed downloads.

The parfive package was motivated by the needs of SunPy’s net submodule, but should be generally applicable to anyone who wants a user friendly way of downloading multiple files in parallel. Parfive supports downloading files over either HTTP or FTP using aiohttp and aioftp aioftp is an optional dependency, which does not need to be installed to download files over HTTP.

Installation

parfive can be installed via pip:

pip install parfive

or with FTP support:

pip install parfive[ftp]

or with conda from conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge parfive

or from GitHub.

Usage

parfive works by creating a downloader object, queuing downloads with it and then running the download. parfive has a synchronous API, but uses asyncio to parallelise downloading the files.

A simple example is:

from parfive import Downloader
dl = Downloader()
dl.enqueue_file("http://data.sunpy.org/sample-data/predicted-sunspot-radio-flux.txt", path="./")
files = dl.download()

It’s also possible to download a list of URLs to a single destination using the parfive.Downloader.simple_download method:

from parfive import Downloader
files = Downloader.simple_download(['http://212.183.159.230/5MB.zip' 'http://212.183.159.230/10MB.zip'], path="./")

Parfive also bundles a CLI. The following example will download the two files concurrently:

$ parfive 'http://212.183.159.230/5MB.zip' 'http://212.183.159.230/10MB.zip'
$ parfive --help
usage: parfive [-h] [--max-conn MAX_CONN] [--overwrite] [--no-file-progress] [--directory DIRECTORY] [--print-filenames] URLS [URLS ...]

Parfive, the python asyncio based downloader

positional arguments:
  URLS                  URLs of files to be downloaded.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --max-conn MAX_CONN   Number of maximum connections.
  --overwrite           Overwrite if the file exists.
  --no-file-progress    Show progress bar for each file.
  --directory DIRECTORY
                        Directory to which downloaded files are saved.
  --print-filenames     Print successfully downloaded files's names to stdout.

Classes

Downloader([max_conn, progress, ...])

Download files in parallel.

Results(*args[, errors])

The results of a download from parfive.Downloader.download.

Class Inheritance Diagram

Inheritance diagram of parfive.downloader.Downloader, parfive.results.Results

Environment Variables

To facilitate debugging parfive reads the following environment variables:

  • PARFIVE_SINGLE_DOWNLOAD - If set (to any value) this variable sets max_conn and max_splits to one; meaning that no parallelisation of the downloads will occur.

  • PARFIVE_DISABLE_RANGE - If set (to any value) this variable will set max_splits to one; meaning that each file downloaded will only have one concurrent connection, although multiple files may be downloaded simultaneously.

  • PARFIVE_OVERWRITE_ENABLE_AIOFILES - If set (to any value) and aiofiles is installed in the system, aiofiles will be used to write files to disk.

  • PARFIVE_DEBUG - If set (to any value) will configure the built-in Python logger to log to stderr and set parfive, aiohttp and aioftp to debug levels.

Changelog

See GitHub Releases for the release history and changelog.