Installing muxget¶

What you need¶

muxget does not download anything itself. It runs three well-known tools and manages everything around them.

program	needed for
`aria2c`	direct files, torrents, magnets
`yt-dlp`	video sites, playlists, anything aria2c does not claim
`wget`	crawling and offline mirrors

Any of them can be missing. You only lose what it does. muxget checks your PATH at startup and names the ones it did not find in the status line, so a missing tool is visible before you paste your first link rather than after. A url whose tool is not installed fails straight away instead of sitting in the queue forever.

# Arch
sudo pacman -S aria2 yt-dlp wget

# Debian, Ubuntu
sudo apt install aria2 yt-dlp wget

# Fedora
sudo dnf install aria2 yt-dlp wget

# macOS
brew install aria2 yt-dlp wget

Install muxget¶

From source¶

You need a Rust toolchain.

git clone https://github.com/maniebra/muxget
cd muxget
cargo install --path .

From a release¶

Every release ships prebuilt packages on the releases page:

you have	take
Debian, Ubuntu, Mint	the `.deb`
Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE	the `.rpm`
any other Linux	the `.AppImage`, or the `.tar.gz`
macOS on Apple silicon	the `aarch64-apple-darwin` tarball
Windows	the `.msi` installer, or the bare `.exe`

Linux and Windows builds cover both x86_64 and arm64.

Running it¶

muxget [-d DIR] [-j N] [--theme NAME] [--log FILE|off] [--log-level LEVEL]
       [--log-format TEMPLATE] [URL...]

flag	means
`-d <dir>`	download folder for this run
`-j <n>`	how many downloads run at once in the default queue, 1 to 16
`--theme <name>`	theme for this run, or set `MUXGET_THEME` in the environment
`--log <file\\|off>`	file the log is written to, `off` to write none, or set `MUXGET_LOG`
`--log-level <level>`	how much is logged: `debug`, `info` (default), `warn`, `error`, or set `MUXGET_LOG_LEVEL`
`--log-format <template>`	what a written line looks like, from `{date}`, `{time}`, `{level}` and `{text}`, or set `MUXGET_LOG_FORMAT`
`--log <file>`	log file for this run, `off` to disable, or set `MUXGET_LOG` (default `<config>/muxget.log`)
`--log-level <level>`	`debug`, `info`, `warn` or `error`, or set `MUXGET_LOG_LEVEL` (default `info`)
`--log-format <template>`	line template, or set `MUXGET_LOG_FORMAT`. Placeholders: `{date} {time} {level} {text}`
`<url>...`	queued at startup, routed by the same rules as `a`

The download folder is the first of these that exists: -d, the folder you used last run, the folder you are standing in. None of these flags is saved: they override your settings for that run only. A theme name it does not recognise quietly falls back to the default rather than refusing to start.

The log¶

Everything the log tab shows is appended to ~/.config/muxget/muxget.log ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/muxget/muxget.log if you set that), including the status lines the app shows you and every backend command it runs. Once the file passes 1 MB it is renamed to muxget.log.1 at the next start, so it keeps one run's worth of history behind the current one.

muxget --log ~/muxget.log                     # somewhere else
muxget --log off                              # nowhere
muxget --log-level debug                      # the startup and exit lines too
muxget --log-format '{time} {level}: {text}'  # no date column

Every line in the log tab is also appended to the log file — the command each backend was started with, whatever it printed to stderr, and every status line the app showed you. --log-level debug adds startup and exit lines; --log off writes no file at all. The file is rotated to <name>.1 once it passes 1 MB.

Next: getting started.