Today I’ve experienced an interesting download story 🙂 It is about file download from China-based Anyshare platform via cURL. I need it because of the network restriction applied by China and the long-time waiting problem on my PC.

I wanted my supervisor to send me a few additional files containing large-size files for my thesis study. He sent me a URL, the file size was about 8 GB. When I tried to download it, the download speed was about 50 KB/s – 250 KB/s. Terrible!

I decided to download it into my server located in the USA, it would be faster. However, I don’t know how to do it! Firstly, I tried to use an X11 forwarding web browser to go to the URL and download it, because the URL was protected by a password at the frontend side. After typing, I could see the download button.

Password protection…

But when I hover the download button, I could not see any URL at the bottom of the browser like “http://blabla.com/examplefile.zip”. The main reason why I tried X11 method, I thought to click it from the frontend and start downloading the file into my server via its network. But failed! 😀 X11 forwarding was too slow for Firefox and Midori.

Let me try cURL!

I thought to analyze the network request by browser console and find the download request if I reproduce it or not. I clicked the “Download” while “Network Console” is open at the side.

I found the request!

It is a get method! By the way, look at my downloading notification, the metrics on it. I did not want to wait for a long time. So I copied the GET URL to try cURL method.

I connected to my server that has super network speed hosted at DigitalOcean 🙂 and type cURL command.

cURL downloading… Look at the metrics!

Final!

After it’s completed, you can download the file from your server to the home PC  (SCP) without restriction.