Chanarch is a program for downloading the files from 4chan threads.
See the file ChangeLog.rst for a user-friendly list of changes, or run git log in
a git clone of the chanarch repository for a more developer-friendly list of
changes.
See the file AUTHORS.rst for a list of contributers.
See the file LICENSE for the license (GPLv3)
Note that chanarch is beta-quality software at best, and is still under development. Keep in mind some options and arguments are still subject to change. Please report bugs or suggest features on chanarch's GitHub
- Thread file downloading
- File download resuming
- Server connection reusage (greatly speeds multiple file downloads)
Chanarch allows several methods of specifying threads to download.
In order to download a single 4chan thread, run:
./chanarch.py URL
URL should be something like:
http(s)://boards.4chan.org/[BOARD]/thread/[THREAD_NUMBER]
Essentially, the URLs are just the same URL you would find a 4chan thread at in a web browser.
This will download all of the files from this thread into a subdirectory of the current directory, based on the thread number.
If you want to download multiple 4chan threads, run:
./chanarch.py URL URL ...
Each thread will be downloaded into its own subdirectory.
If you want to download to another directory, instead of the current directory, run:
./chanarch.py -d DIRECTORY URL ...
This will create the subdirectories in DIRECTORY.
Chanarch can also read a list of threads from files. In order to do this, create a file, or multiple files, with one URL per line. For instance:
./chanarch.py -f FILE
This will read URLs from FILE, one per line.
Multiple types of arguments can be used simultaneously, such as:
./chanarch.py -f FILE1 -f FILE2 -d DIRECTORY URL1 URL2
In order to get a full list of arguments, as well as their corresponding long-argument versions, run:
./chanarch.py --help
For instance, it may be helpful to add the -v or --verbose flag to be
assured that threads are being downloaded.
In most shells, you can also run something similar to:
while true; do ./chanarch.py -d DIR -f FILE; sleep 5m; done
This will repeatedly download threads, waiting for 5 minutes in between. Essentially, this is an ad-hoc thread watcher.
Chanarch requires Python. It was written with both Python 2 and Python 3 in mind, and should work equally on any recent version of Python, though Python versions before 2.7 are not currently tested.
The latest versioned releases of chanarch can be obtained from its GitHub release page
The latest development version of Chanarch can be obtained from its GitHub page or directly cloned with:
git clone https://github.com/diatomic-ge/chanarch.git
The master branch will always point to the latest stable version, if one exists. Other branches may contain more up-to-date, but unstable, versions.
Copyright (C) 2014 diatomic.ge
This file is part of chanarch.
Chanarch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of that License, or (at your option) any later version.
Chanarch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with chanarch. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>