ja7ad/hydra

Overview

Hydra Download Manager (HDM) is a download accelerator written in Rust that splits a file across multiple connections and independent mirror sources, rebalancing ranges from slow peers to faster ones as the transfer runs. It ships in two shapes: a wget/curl-compatible CLI (installed under both hydra and the short hya) and a desktop GUI for Windows, macOS, and Linux with queue scheduling, tray integration, and browser hand-off extensions overview.

Potential users are people who regularly pull large files and want more throughput than a single-connection client provides, plus developers who want the same engine available as a library.

Install and first download

Prebuilt installers exist for most platforms. On macOS or Linux, the install script fetches the matching archive from the latest GitHub release; add --cli for a CLI-only install installation:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ja7ad/hydra/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --cli

Alternatives include Homebrew (brew install ja7ad/tap/hydra or the --cask for the macOS app), Winget (winget install ja7ad.Hydra), a Launchpad PPA, Fedora COPR, AUR, Flatpak, and an AppImage installation.

With the CLI on PATH, a bare invocation downloads with an automatically chosen connection count:

hydra https://example.com/archive.tar.gz

hya is the same binary under a shorter name; use it on systems that already have the unrelated THC-Hydra login auditor installed as hydra usage. Options, mirror lists, Metalink, wget/curl compatibility modes, the interactive queue, cookies, and checksum repair are documented in the Hydra CLI Guide.

Building from source needs Rust 1.80+; cargo build --release produces target/release/hydra, while make build also compiles the GUI and native-messaging host from source.

Platforms and plugins

Desktop artifacts link the system GTK, X11, and ALSA libraries and are built on Ubuntu 22.04 (glibc 2.35 floor); the AppImage goes back to glibc 2.31. The static musl CLI build works on any Linux distribution but cannot load native plugins — use the CLI from a desktop bundle, a distro package, or a GNU-target source build for those installation.

The plugin system adds source resolvers and transfer engines as .hyaplugin packages. Wasm plugins run sandboxed with host-mediated permissions; native modules are loaded in-process after a hash check and run with the host's OS permissions, so they require trusting that component. Official releases bundle YouTube and torrent plugins, with the bundled torrent library signed by Hydra plugins.

Embedding the engine

libhydra exposes the hya-core and hya-net engine through a stable C ABI, separately versioned and released as static and shared libraries with headers for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. Jobs are identified by durable uint64_t IDs and progress is delivered through an event queue, making it usable from Go, Swift, Kotlin, Dart, C#, and Python embedding. Note that the CLI is GPL-3.0-or-later, while the core and FFI libraries are dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0 license.

HotRepo's take

On 2026-11-11 the repository placed 8th on the Rust daily list with 16 stars gained that day, against 1,392 stars and 85 forks. That is a single daily snapshot for a repository created in August 2026, so it shows a recent burst of attention on the Rust list rather than a sustained trend. The README backs that attention with reproducible benchmark scripts and a documented ABI for the engine, which makes the project's claims checkable rather than purely presentational.