Quickly — Multi-Connection CLI Downloader

A fast, resilient, multi-connection file downloader for Node.js inspired by tools like FDM/IDM.

Quickly splits files into chunks and downloads them in parallel with resume support, retries, and live progress tracking.

✨ Features

• ⚡ Multi-connection downloading (parallel chunk downloads)
• ♻️ Resume partially downloaded files
• 🔁 Automatic retry per chunk
• 📊 Live progress bar with speed + ETA
• 🧠 Smart chunk splitting based on file size
• 🧵 Connection pooling (prevents too many sockets)
• 🧾 Verbose debug mode
• 🔗 Automatic fallback if server doesn't support range requests

Demo (npx)

npx @raj-vashisht/quickly https://speed.hetzner.de/100MB.bin test.bin --verbose --connections 5 --retry 3

📦 Installation

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/yourname/quickly.git
cd quickly

Install dependencies:

npm install

Build:

npm run build

Make CLI globally available (optional):

npm link

Now you can use the quickly command anywhere.

🚀 Usage

quickly <url> [output] [options]

Basic download

quickly https://example.com/file.zip

Custom output filename

quickly https://example.com/file.zip myfile.zip

⚙️ Options

| Option | Description | Default | | ---------------------------- | ------------------------ | ------- | | -c, --connections <number> | Max parallel connections | 5 | | -r, --retries <number> | Retries per chunk | 3 | | -v, --verbose | Show detailed logs | off |

Examples

Download with 2 connections

quickly https://example.com/file.iso -c 2

Increase retries

quickly https://example.com/file.iso -r 5

Verbose mode

quickly https://example.com/file.iso -v

📊 How It Works

1. Fetch file size + check if server supports range requests.
2. Split file into chunks.
3. Start a worker pool (limited parallel connections).
4. Download chunks concurrently.
5. Track global progress, speed, and ETA.
6. Merge chunks into final file.

If the server doesn’t support range requests, Quickly automatically falls back to single-connection download.

🧠 Resume Support

If download stops mid-way:

quickly <some-url> <some-output>

Previously downloaded chunks will resume automatically.

📈 Progress Bar

⬇️ ████████████ 78% | 780MB/1GB | 12MB/s | ETA 18s

Verbose mode also shows per-chunk logs.

🛠 Tech Stack

• Node.js
• Undici (HTTP client)
• Commander (CLI framework)
• cli-progress (progress bar)
• Chalk (colored logs)

🧪 Dev Scripts

npm run dev     # run in dev mode
npm run build   # build TypeScript
npm run start   # run built CLI

🔮 Roadmap

• Pause / Resume across app restarts
• Download queue (multiple files)
• Mirror download support
• Per-chunk speed statistics
• Config file support

🤝 Contributing

PRs welcome! Feel free to open issues for feature requests or bugs.

📄 License

MIT License