I have a Python script that launches a URL that is a downloadable file. Is there some way to have Python display the download progress as oppose to launching the browser?
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1I'm probably late but you can use this library that is exactly what you want: https://pypi.org/project/Pretty-Downloader/0.0.2/ – DeadSec Feb 26 '21 at 19:02
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I'm surprised that [tqdm](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tqdm) has not been suggested! [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJ21m.gif) – kekkler Sep 01 '17 at 07:07
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Something @DeadSec maybe should have disclosed is that they are the maintainer of said library – Enok82 Aug 18 '23 at 12:02
16 Answers
I've just written a super simple (slightly hacky) approach to this for scraping PDFs off a certain site. Note, it only works correctly on Unix based systems (Linux, mac os) as PowerShell does not handle "\r"
:
import sys
import requests
link = "http://indy/abcde1245"
file_name = "download.data"
with open(file_name, "wb") as f:
print("Downloading %s" % file_name)
response = requests.get(link, stream=True)
total_length = response.headers.get('content-length')
if total_length is None: # no content length header
f.write(response.content)
else:
dl = 0
total_length = int(total_length)
for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=4096):
dl += len(data)
f.write(data)
done = int(50 * dl / total_length)
sys.stdout.write("\r[%s%s]" % ('=' * done, ' ' * (50-done)) )
sys.stdout.flush()
It uses the requests library so you'll need to install that. This outputs something like the following into your console:
>Downloading download.data
>[============= ]
The progress bar is 52 characters wide in the script (2 characters are simply the []
so 50 characters of progress). Each =
represents 2% of the download.
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I tried initialized it as requests = {} but that still didn't fix it. Not sure why? – user1607549 Mar 26 '13 at 19:39
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@user1607549 from above "It uses the requests library so you'll need to install that." (sudo pip install requests) then `import requests` – Endophage Mar 26 '13 at 19:50
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What is `pdf` in this example? I understand you're downloading pdf files, but is pdf a module? – EML Mar 26 '13 at 20:30
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@EML sorry, literally copy pasted out of my own script, renamed some variables to make it more generic, missed that one. I'll fix now, it was just a variable name. – Endophage Mar 26 '13 at 21:56
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2You may want to define chunk_size in iter_content so it won't be so slow. – 0942v8653 Jan 05 '15 at 18:39
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3As @0942v8653 mentions, iter_content() takes a chunk_size so you can specify it for speed, but also if the content you are downloading is small enough that ~ 1% of it can fit in memory, you could simplify your code alot by doing chunk_size=total_length/100 and each iteration of the loop would be 1% of your download – cnelson Mar 13 '15 at 13:52
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2Worked for me on Windows. Also changed one line from `for data in response.iter_content():` to `for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=total_length/100):`. – mrgloom May 06 '16 at 09:52
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@mrgloom's solutions also has one other advantage: if you don't define `chunk_size` it will be veeeeery slow (also @0942v8653 said this and here is a related GH issue: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/2015). So always define chunk size to be something like 4096. – Grey Panther Sep 06 '16 at 04:17
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It wasn't working until I've changed the `response = requests.get(link, stream=True)` bit into `response = requests.get(link + "/" + file_name, stream=True)`. As it is, it just downloads the webpage (for me at least). – nnsense Dec 25 '18 at 13:58
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It's only sample code. The file_name is the local file name, the link is the URL to the file. If your URL happens to end with the the same thing you want the local file to be called, that's incidental to your situation. – Endophage Jan 02 '19 at 08:50
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Thanks, this was really useful. I suggest using `'\N{full block}'` instead of `'='` to make the progress bar look professional. That's what I did. But I admit, you have to be really smart to be able to come up with code like this. I have a question too. Is `sys.stdout.write` the same as `print` with `end=''`? – Pyzard Aug 10 '20 at 02:58
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@Pyzard `print` has a bunch of parameters that make your life easier, like simply passing in an `int` or anything else and printing out many things at once. But basically, yes. – David Jul 12 '21 at 06:49
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@MinekPo1 Exactly, `\r` works on my windows 10 machine, both in `cmd` *and* in powershell. For example: `for i in range(n): print(f'\r{i/n*100:.1f}%', end='')` works like a charm. – djvg Jul 12 '22 at 16:14
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You can use the 'clint' package (written by the same author as 'requests') to add a simple progress bar to your downloads like this:
import requests
from clint.textui import progress
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
path = '/some/path/for/file.txt'
with open(path, 'wb') as f:
total_length = int(r.headers.get('content-length'))
for chunk in progress.bar(r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024), expected_size=(total_length/1024) + 1):
if chunk:
f.write(chunk)
f.flush()
which will give you a dynamic output which will look like this:
[################################] 5210/5210 - 00:00:01
It should work on multiple platforms as well! You can also change the bar to dots or a spinner with .dots and .mill instead of .bar.
Enjoy!

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2it would be great if this can be a part of python standard library. – Ciasto piekarz Aug 16 '14 at 08:16
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1Commenting for when I inevitably want to return to this - this is great! – scubbo Oct 31 '19 at 05:48
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Great. You could grab filename with re.findall('filename=(.+)', r.headers.get('content-disposition')) – Ehsan Ahmadi Feb 10 '21 at 16:30
Python 3 with TQDM
This is the suggested technique from the TQDM docs.
import urllib.request
from tqdm import tqdm
class DownloadProgressBar(tqdm):
def update_to(self, b=1, bsize=1, tsize=None):
if tsize is not None:
self.total = tsize
self.update(b * bsize - self.n)
def download_url(url, output_path):
with DownloadProgressBar(unit='B', unit_scale=True,
miniters=1, desc=url.split('/')[-1]) as t:
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename=output_path, reporthook=t.update_to)

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There is an answer with requests and tqdm.
import requests
from tqdm import tqdm
def download(url: str, fname: str):
resp = requests.get(url, stream=True)
total = int(resp.headers.get('content-length', 0))
# Can also replace 'file' with a io.BytesIO object
with open(fname, 'wb') as file, tqdm(
desc=fname,
total=total,
unit='iB',
unit_scale=True,
unit_divisor=1024,
) as bar:
for data in resp.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
size = file.write(data)
bar.update(size)
Gist: https://gist.github.com/yanqd0/c13ed29e29432e3cf3e7c38467f42f51

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Another good option is wget
:
import wget
wget.download('http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/US.zip')
The output will look like this:
11% [........ ] 73728 / 633847
Source: https://medium.com/@petehouston/download-files-with-progress-in-python-96f14f6417a2

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You can also use click. It has a good library for progress bar:
import click
with click.progressbar(length=total_size, label='Downloading files') as bar:
for file in files:
download(file)
bar.update(file.size)

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3@MortenB Is it? I get `ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'click'` on 3.6.1. – alexia Aug 12 '17 at 09:29
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Sorry for being late with an answer; just updated the tqdm
docs:
https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/#hooks-and-callbacks
Using urllib.urlretrieve
and OOP:
import urllib
from tqdm.auto import tqdm
class TqdmUpTo(tqdm):
"""Provides `update_to(n)` which uses `tqdm.update(delta_n)`."""
def update_to(self, b=1, bsize=1, tsize=None):
"""
b : Blocks transferred so far
bsize : Size of each block
tsize : Total size
"""
if tsize is not None:
self.total = tsize
self.update(b * bsize - self.n) # will also set self.n = b * bsize
eg_link = "https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/releases/download/v4.46.0/tqdm-4.46.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl"
eg_file = eg_link.split('/')[-1]
with TqdmUpTo(unit='B', unit_scale=True, unit_divisor=1024, miniters=1,
desc=eg_file) as t: # all optional kwargs
urllib.urlretrieve(
eg_link, filename=eg_file, reporthook=t.update_to, data=None)
t.total = t.n
or using requests.get
and file wrappers:
import requests
from tqdm.auto import tqdm
eg_link = "https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/releases/download/v4.46.0/tqdm-4.46.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl"
eg_file = eg_link.split('/')[-1]
response = requests.get(eg_link, stream=True)
with tqdm.wrapattr(open(eg_file, "wb"), "write", miniters=1,
total=int(response.headers.get('content-length', 0)),
desc=eg_file) as fout:
for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=4096):
fout.write(chunk)
You could of course mix & match techniques.

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# Define Progress Bar function
def print_progressbar(total, current, barsize=60):
progress = int(current*barsize/total)
completed = str(int(current*100/total)) + '%'
print('[', chr(9608)*progress, ' ', completed, '.'*(barsize-progress), '] ', str(i)+'/'+str(total), sep='', end='\r', flush=True)
# Sample Code
total = 6000
barsize = 60
print_frequency = max(min(total//barsize, 100), 1)
print("Start Task..", flush=True)
for i in range(1, total+1):
if i%print_frequency == 0 or i == 1:
print_progressbar(total, i, barsize)
print("\nFinished", flush=True)
# Snapshot of Progress Bar :
Below lines are for illustrations only. In command prompt you will see single progress bar showing incremental progress.
[ 0%............................................................] 1/6000
[██████████ 16%..................................................] 1000/6000
[████████████████████ 33%........................................] 2000/6000
[██████████████████████████████ 50%..............................] 3000/6000
[████████████████████████████████████████ 66%....................] 4000/6000
[██████████████████████████████████████████████████ 83%..........] 5000/6000
[████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 100%] 6000/6000

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The tqdm
package now includes a function designed to handle exactly this type of situation: wrapattr
. You just wrap an object's read
(or write
) attribute, and tqdm handles the rest. Here's a simple download function that puts it all together with requests
:
def download(url, filename):
import functools
import pathlib
import shutil
import requests
import tqdm
r = requests.get(url, stream=True, allow_redirects=True)
if r.status_code != 200:
r.raise_for_status() # Will only raise for 4xx codes, so...
raise RuntimeError(f"Request to {url} returned status code {r.status_code}")
file_size = int(r.headers.get('Content-Length', 0))
path = pathlib.Path(filename).expanduser().resolve()
path.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
desc = "(Unknown total file size)" if file_size == 0 else ""
r.raw.read = functools.partial(r.raw.read, decode_content=True) # Decompress if needed
with tqdm.tqdm.wrapattr(r.raw, "read", total=file_size, desc=desc) as r_raw:
with path.open("wb") as f:
shutil.copyfileobj(r_raw, f)
return path

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Just some improvements of @rich-jones's answer
import re
import request
from clint.textui import progress
def get_filename(cd):
"""
Get filename from content-disposition
"""
if not cd:
return None
fname = re.findall('filename=(.+)', cd)
if len(fname) == 0:
return None
return fname[0].replace('"', "")
def stream_download_file(url, output, chunk_size=1024, session=None, verbose=False):
if session:
file = session.get(url, stream=True)
else:
file = requests.get(url, stream=True)
file_name = get_filename(file.headers.get('content-disposition'))
filepath = "{}/{}".format(output, file_name)
if verbose:
print ("Downloading {}".format(file_name))
with open(filepath, 'wb') as f:
total_length = int(file.headers.get('content-length'))
for chunk in progress.bar(file.iter_content(chunk_size=chunk_size), expected_size=(total_length/chunk_size) + 1):
if chunk:
f.write(chunk)
f.flush()
if verbose:
print ("Finished")

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I come up with a solution that looks a bit nicer based on tqdm
. My implementation is based on the answer of @Endophage.
The effect:
# import the download_file definition from the next cell first.
>>> download_file(url, 'some_data.dat')
Downloading some_data.dat.
7%|█▎ | 195.31MB/2.82GB: [00:04<01:02, 49.61MB/s]
The implementation:
import time
import math
import requests
from tqdm import tqdm
def download_file(url, filename, update_interval=500, chunk_size=4096):
def memory2str(mem):
sizes = ['B', 'KB', 'MB', 'GB', 'TB', 'PB']
power = int(math.log(mem, 1024))
size = sizes[power]
for _ in range(power):
mem /= 1024
if power > 0:
return f'{mem:.2f}{size}'
else:
return f'{mem}{size}'
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
total_length = response.headers.get('content-length')
if total_length is None:
f.write(response.content)
else:
print(f'Downloading {filename}.', flush=True)
downloaded, total_length = 0, int(total_length)
total_size = memory2str(total_length)
bar_format = '{percentage:3.0f}%|{bar:20}| {desc} [{elapsed}<{remaining}' \
'{postfix}]'
if update_interval * chunk_size * 100 >= total_length:
update_interval = 1
with tqdm(total=total_length, bar_format=bar_format) as bar:
counter = 0
now_time, now_size = time.time(), downloaded
for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=chunk_size):
f.write(data)
downloaded += len(data)
counter += 1
bar.update(len(data))
if counter % update_interval == 0:
ellapsed = time.time() - now_time
runtime_downloaded = downloaded - now_size
now_time, now_size = time.time(), downloaded
cur_size = memory2str(downloaded)
speed_size = memory2str(runtime_downloaded / ellapsed)
bar.set_description(f'{cur_size}/{total_size}')
bar.set_postfix_str(f'{speed_size}/s')
counter = 0

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Simple solution with wget
and tqdm
python libraries that shows progress in megabytes and remaining time:
MB: 37%|███▋ | 2044.8/5588.7 [02:57<04:30, 13.11it/s]
Install libraries
pip3 install wget tqdm
Import libraries
import wget from tqdm import tqdm
Wrapper class for tqdm
class ProgressBar: def __init__(self): self.progress_bar = None def __call__(self, current_bytes, total_bytes, width): current_mb = round(current_bytes / 1024 ** 2, 1) total_mb = round(total_bytes / 1024 ** 2, 1) if self.progress_bar is None: self.progress_bar = tqdm(total=total_mb, desc="MB") delta_mb = current_mb - self.progress_bar.n self.progress_bar.update(delta_mb)
How to use it
wget.download(url, dst_filepath, ProgressBar())

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Here is the "Goat Progress bar" implementation from George Hotz.
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
progress_bar = tqdm(total=int(r.headers.get('content-length', 0)), unit='B', unit_scale=True, desc=url)
dat = b''.join(x for x in r.iter_content(chunk_size=16384) if progress_bar.update(len(x)) or True)
cc: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/commit/7118602c976d264d97af3c1c8b97d72077616d07

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You can easily use the dlbar
module:
python3 -m pip install dlbar
Just import
it and call the download
method:
from dlbar import DownloadBar
download_bar = DownloadBar()
download_bar.download(
url='https://url',
dest='/a/b/c/downloaded_file.suffix',
title='Downloading downloaded_file.suffix'
)
Output:
Downloading downloaded_file.suffix
43% █████████████████████----------------------------- 197.777 MB/450.327 MB
You can also customize the download bar. See here for more information.

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I modified the many great suggestions to suit my situation.
I needed to download a large .txt file (>2.5 GB). Each line in the text file contains a unique paragraph. And hence I needed to retrieve a list of paragraphs from the file.
Be aware that the following code is not 100% bulletproof. This is because the chunks might not be exactly at the end/beginning of a paragraph, resulting in paragraphs being split into two. However, in my case, that was not an issue. Increasing the chunk_size
will reduce the number of "corrupt" paragraphs.
import requests
from tqdm import tqdm
def DownloadFile(url):
req = requests.get(url, stream=True)
total_length = int(req.headers.get('content-length'))
chunk_size = 4194304 # 4Mb
steps = total_length / chunk_size
data = []
for chunk in tqdm(req.iter_content(chunk_size=chunk_size), total=steps):
text = chunk.decode("utf-8", "ignore")
for line in text.split("\n"):
data.append(line.rstrip())
return data

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You can stream a downloads as it is here -> Stream a Download.
Also you can Stream Uploads.
The most important streaming a request is done unless you try to access the response.content with just 2 lines
for line in r.iter_lines():
if line:
print(line)

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