Recently, I've been fed up with the slow downloads in Chrome, so I tried configuring Aria2 and found it to be very good. I have documented the process below.
Backend#
Installation#
Aria2 can be found in the Arch Linux repository, and all we need to do is:
sudo pacman -S aria2
Configuration#
After installation, we would normally need to perform complex configurations. Fortunately, someone has already compiled a relatively universal configuration solution. We can make minor modifications based on the comments in this configuration.
The default configuration file for Aria2 is ~/.aria2/aria2.conf. For convenience, let's directly place the configuration file here:
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/P3TERX/aria2.conf
mv aria2.conf .aria2
Then open ~/.aria2/aria2.conf and make modifications according to the configuration (usually only the various paths and rpc-secret need to be modified).
Automatic Startup#
With the above configuration file, we have enabled rpc for aria2.
Let me explain here, the default mode of Aria2 is to manually run aria2 for each download and automatically close it after completion. However, with rpc enabled, aria2 will run as a background application continuously, and we can request downloads from the background aria2 at any time.
In general, it is recommended to use rpc, as many frontends of aria2 are based on rpc operation.
From the above explanation, we know that the current aria2 needs to be started in the background. However, we can't manually execute it every time the computer starts up. Therefore, we need to configure automatic startup for it. Arch Wiki recommends using systemd:
To use aria2 as a daemon, you can write a systemd user unit.
要将 aria2 用作守护程序，您可以编写一个 systemd 用户单元。
Specifically, you need to place an aria2.service service in the ~/.config/systemd/user directory, with the following content:
[Unit]
Description=Aria2 Daemon
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/aria2c
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Then execute the following command to start it:
systemctl --user enable aria2.service
systemctl --user start aria2.service
With this, the backend configuration is complete.
Frontend#
Currently, there are several popular Aria2 frontends, such as AriaNg, webui-aria2, yaaw, and so on, and their usage is similar.
My goal is to use it to replace Chrome's built-in download function, so in the end, I chose the Aria2 for Chrome extension. This extension can intercept Chrome's download requests and forward them to Aria2, and it also embeds the AriaNg frontend interface for user management. I will mainly introduce this extension.
First, install the extension and configure it:
Although theoretically, configuring it in the extension should be enough, for safety reasons, let's open the embedded AriaNg in the extension and perform the same configuration inside:
The other Aria2 options don't need to be changed because they use the backend configuration we did earlier.
After completing the configuration, open the sidebar. If the sidebar displays "Aria2 Status: Connected," it means the configuration was successful. Congratulations!
