Dan Donoghue
Dan Donoghue
Aria2 is a CLI download manager that can download files over several different protocols. I’ve been meaning to set something like this up for ages, as it’s better to download files on my server than to leave another machine turned on.
The following commands enable the EPEL repo, install aria2 and httpd, and adds a firewall rule to allow HTTP traffic from the public zone. If you’ve set up different zones (like I have), use the zone that you want to allow access from.
sudo yum -y install epel-release
sudo yum -y install aria2 httpd
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=http
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=http --permanent
To run Aria2 as a service, you need to give it a user account. This helps security-wise because you can tune what locations it can access using ACLs and such. The following command creates a service user, with the shell /sbin/nologin, and the home directory /path/where/downloads/are/stored.
You should change the home directory to wherever you’re storing downloaded files.
sudo useradd -s /sbin/nologin -r aria2 -d /path/where/downloads/are/stored
.service fileSystemd service files are small configuration files that tell systemd how it should run something. The following code block is my service file, which I saved as /etc/systemd/system/aria2.service. The important lines are in the Service block, specifically the User and WorkingDirectory lines. You should update User to be the user you wish to run Aria2 as, and also update WorkingDirectory to point to the location where you want to store downloaded files.
[Unit]
Description=Aria2 Download Manager
After=network.target
[Service]
User=aria2
WorkingDirectory=/path/where/downloads/are/stored
ExecStart=/bin/aria2c --enable-rpc --show-console-readout=false
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Whenever you update systemd’s .service files, you have to run a daemon-reload. If you want to have the service start automatically at it’s default targets (WantedBy=multi-user.target) then you must enable it. To simply start the service right now, you use the start line. The following code block shows all three systemctl commands needed to get Aria2 running and to auto-start it at boot.
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable aria2.service
sudo systemctl start aria2.service
Firstly, you need to make a directory in /var/www that will contain the Aria2 WebUI files.
sudo mkdir /var/www/aria2
Once this directory is made, download the Aria2 WebUI and place them into the newly created folder. Make sure that index.html is located at /var/www/aria2/index.html.
Httpd needs to be configured to proxy the /jsonrpc endpoint to the port that Aria2 listens on (default: tcp/6800). The following virtual-host configuration file covers the basics. Save this file as /etc/httpd/conf.d/aria2.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/aria2
ProxyPass "/jsonrpc" "http://localhost:6800/jsonrpc"
ProxyPassReverse "/jsonrpc" "http://localhost:6800/jsonrpc"
</VirtualHost>
Because the reverse proxy is being used, httpd needs to be able to connect to network ports. This is blocked by default by selinux.
sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect on
sudo systemctl enable httpd.service
sudo systemctl start httpd.service
After the previous steps, you should have running Aria2 and httpd services. Opening http://<ip>/ should show you the WebUI, which should be connected to Aria2 over the reverse proxy to Aria2’s jsonrpc URI. If something doesn’t work, check the logs of the httpd and aria2 services.
Apache stores its logs in various different files instead of the systemd approach of using journald, so you’ll have to check the files the old-school way with tail.
sudo tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log
Because Aria2 is being run as a systemd service, its stdout is being redirected into journald. The easiest way to read these logs is with journalctl.
sudo journalctl -lfu aria2
You can also see a status for the service by using systemctl status <unit>, like so:
sudo systemctl status aria2.service