How to Download Files in Python?

Generally, we use a web browser to download files from the internet. The downloading of a file is similar to accessing a web page hosted on a server. We sent the get request to the file url address and in response, we get the file. In this Python tutorial, I will walk you through a Python program to download files from the internet using a simple HTTP request. Also, I will be downloading the Python 3.9 .exe file from the internet using the Python program. But before we discuss the Python code to download files, let's take a look at the libraries that we need to use to make the Python program workable.

Required Python Libraries

1. Python requests library

requests is one of the most popular Python libraries that is used to send HTTP requests. Most Python web frameworks use this library for HTTP requests. In this tutorial, we will be using this library to send GET requests to the file url that we want to download. requests is not a part of Python Standard libraries, so we need to install it for our Python environment using the following pip command:

pip install requests

2. Python progress library (optional)

The second library that we will be using  is progress , which is an open-source third-party Python library. We will use this library to display a console-based progress bar for visualizing the downloading progress of the file. To download the progress library for your Python environment, we will run the following pip command on the terminal or command prompt:

pip install progress

How to Download Files in Python?

Alright, now let's get started with the Python program to download a file from the internet. Let's start with importing the modules.

import requests
from progress.bar import Bar

After importing the modules, let's define the file_url string variable that represents the url for the file that we want to download. In this tutorial, I will download the Python 3.9.exe file from the official website of Python, and for that, I need the url path of the file. To get the URL of the file, we can simply right-click on the download button and copy the link address.

file_url="https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.1/python-3.9.1-amd64.exe"

filename = file_url.split("/")[-1]

#send get request
response = requests.get(file_url, stream=True)

file_size = int(response.headers.get("Content-Length", 0))

Now, let's get every chunk of data from the response object using iter_content() function:

with Bar(f'Downloading {filename}', fill='*',suffix='%(percent)d%%') as bar:
    #write file in binary mode
    with open(filename,"wb") as file:
        #iterate over the response in data chunks
        for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=file_size//100):
            file.write(data)   
            bar.next()  #increase downloading bar 
            
print("File has been downloaded successfully")

Bar(f'Downloading {filename}', fill='*',suffix='%(percent)d%%') as bar statement is for the downloading bar progress. with open(filename,"wb") as file: statement will create a filename and write data in binary mode. for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=file_size//100): is a statement that will iterate over the response, and get the specified number of data chunks in every iteration. With each iteration, we will get file_size//100 data values. Now put all the code together and execute.

Complete Python Program to Download Files from the Internet

from progress.bar import Bar
import requests    #pip install requests

file_url="https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.1/python-3.9.1-amd64.exe"

filename = file_url.split("/")[-1]

#send get request
response = requests.get(file_url, stream=True)

file_size = int(response.headers.get("Content-Length", 0))

with Bar(f'Downloading {filename}', fill='*',suffix='%(percent)d%%') as bar:
    #write file in binary mode
    with open(filename,"wb") as file:
        #iterate over the response in data chunks
        for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=file_size//100):
            file.write(data)   
            bar.next()  #increase downloading bar 
            
print("File has been downloaded successfully")

Output

When you execute the above code, the downloading process will begin. After the process gets finished, you can check your directory, and there you will see the downloaded file.

Conclusion

In this Python tutorial, you learned "How to download files from the internet using Python". In the above program, I have used two third-party libraries requests and progress . By using the requests library, I sent a GET request to the file url. Also, with the progress library, I displayed the downloading progress bar, which is nothing but just the 100 write data lines with 100 iterations. If you want to learn how to download all the images from a web page using Python, you can click here .

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