Downloading Files with Python: requests, wget, urllib, urllib3, boto3, and asyncio

This tutorial teaches how to download files using Python, covering a wide range of libraries and techniques.

1. Using requests – Shows how to fetch a URL (including redirected URLs) with requests.get , enable redirects, and write the response to a local file.

2. Using wget – Demonstrates installing the wget module via pip and downloading a file with wget.download(url, filename) .

3. Downloading redirected files – Provides an example of downloading a PDF that is reached through an HTTP redirect, using requests.get with allow_redirects=True and saving the content.

4. Chunked download of large files – Describes setting stream=True in requests.get , iterating over the response in 1024‑byte chunks, writing each chunk to a file, and optionally displaying a progress bar with the clint library.

5. Parallel / batch downloading – Introduces using os , time , and a thread pool (e.g., ThreadPool ) to download multiple files concurrently, timing the operation, and handling each URL with a helper function.

6. Using urllib – Shows how to download a webpage with the standard library urllib.request.urlretrieve , specifying the target filename.

7. Using urllib3 – Explains installing urllib3 , creating a PoolManager , and fetching a URL to store its content in a file.

8. Downloading through a proxy – Demonstrates building a proxy handler with urllib.request.ProxyHandler , opening the proxy via urllib.request.build_opener , and retrieving the desired resource.

9. Downloading from Amazon S3 with boto3 – Guides installing awscli , configuring credentials, importing boto3 and botocore , creating an S3 resource, and calling download_file(bucket, key, filename) to retrieve objects.

10. Using asyncio for asynchronous downloads – Introduces the event‑loop model, defines async coroutine functions with async and await , and shows how to schedule multiple download coroutines, wait for their completion, and run the loop.

The tutorial concludes that Python provides many convenient ways to download files, and the presented examples can be adapted to various use cases.