Hydra Download Manager (HDM)

Fast, resilient, multi-source download manager and accelerator for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
https://hydra.javad.dev

Contents

• Overview
• Key Features
• Engine
• CLI
• Desktop GUI
• Installation
• Quick Install (Bash / PowerShell)
• Homebrew (macOS / Linux)
• Winget (Windows)
• Linux Packages (Ubuntu PPA / Fedora COPR / Arch Linux AUR)
• AppImage (portable, self-updating)
• From Source
• Browser Extension
• Uninstall
• Quick Uninstall (prebuilt installs)
• Usage
• Portable GUI Profile
• Plugins
• Plugin architecture
• Sandbox and native trust
• Plugin inputs and authoring
• Benchmark
• A fair 100 ms path
• Four public mirrors
• Desktop download managers
• Embedding HYDRA — libhydra
• Platform guides
• Contributing
• Code signing policy
• License

Overview

Hydra Download Manager (HDM) is an open-source, high-performance network file retriever and download accelerator designed for speed, resilience, and adaptability. It dynamically partitions downloads across multiple connections and independent mirror sources, continuously rebalancing work to maximize throughput without stalling on slow peers. It ships as both a wget/curl-compatible CLI and a cross-platform desktop download manager with browser integration.

Key Features

Installation

Quick Install (Bash / PowerShell)

macOS / Linux — installs the GUI bundle (GUI + CLI + browser extensions) by default:

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

CLI only:

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

Windows (PowerShell) — installs the GUI bundle by default:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ja7ad/hydra/main/install.ps1 | iex

CLI only:

& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ja7ad/hydra/main/install.ps1))) -Cli

The scripts detect your OS and architecture (amd64/arm64), fetch the matching archive from the latest GitHub release, and install it — on Linux and macOS to /usr/local (falling back to ~/.local; override with --prefix DIR), on Windows to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Hydra. The CLI lands under both hydra and the short hya; an existing hya on the same prefix is never overwritten. GUI installs also register the browser native-messaging host. Pin a release with --version vX.Y.Z / -Version vX.Y.Z, or download the archives yourself from the releases page.

Linux compatibility. The CLI archive is a static musl build with no shared library of any kind, so --cli works on any distribution — old LTS releases, minimal containers, Alpine — regardless of its glibc. The desktop artifacts (GUI archive, .deb, .rpm) link the system's GTK, X11 and ALSA and are built on Ubuntu 22.04, which puts their floor at glibc 2.35: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, RHEL 9 and newer. The AppImage is built on Ubuntu 20.04 and goes further back, to glibc 2.31: Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11 and newer.

A GUI install is a real desktop app, not a loose binary:

• Windows — start-menu and desktop shortcuts (-Desktop:$false skips the desktop shortcut) and an Apps & features entry, so Hydra is listed and uninstallable from Settings like any other app. A hydra-<version>-windows-portable-<amd64|arm64>.zip on the releases page is the alternative for a machine you cannot install on: unpack it anywhere, run HydraPortable.exe, and the app keeps its configuration inside the bundle instead of %APPDATA%\hydra.
• macOS — Hydra Download Manager.app is installed into /Applications (override with --app-dir DIR, e.g. ~/Applications), with its icon and name in Launchpad, Spotlight, the Dock and the app switcher. hydra, hya, hydra-gui and hydra-host in <prefix>/bin are symlinks into the app, so the CLI stays on PATH and one update refreshes both.
• Linux — the logo lands in the hicolor icon theme and a hydra.desktop entry in your applications directory (plus the prefix's, for a system-wide install), so the app shows up in the launcher, the dock and the switcher with its own icon.

Either way the GUI can update itself in place afterwards (Options → General → Check for updates), including an install that lives in a root-owned directory — it asks for authorisation before replacing those files.

Beta channel — --beta (-Beta on Windows) installs the newest -rc pre-release when it is ahead of the latest stable release; otherwise it installs the stable release:

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

& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ja7ad/hydra/main/install.ps1))) -Beta

The GUI's in-app updater follows the same rule: enable Options → General → Download Beta channel and update checks will also offer release candidates while one is ahead of stable.

macOS notes: since the app isn't notarized yet, Gatekeeper may block it — see the macOS Permissions Guide for granting the required permissions. If you installed via the .dmg and macOS refuses to open the app ("damaged" or "unidentified developer"), clear the quarantine attribute:

xattr -cr /Applications/Hydra\ Download\ Manager.app

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

CLI:

brew install ja7ad/tap/hydra

macOS Desktop App (GUI):

brew install --cask ja7ad/tap/hydra

Winget (Windows)

Hydra Download Manager is in the Windows Package Manager repository as ja7ad.Hydra:

winget install ja7ad.Hydra

Update it later with winget upgrade ja7ad.Hydra, or remove it with winget uninstall ja7ad.Hydra.

Linux Packages (Ubuntu PPA / Fedora COPR / Arch Linux AUR)

Ubuntu / Debian-based (Launchpad PPA):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sonycore/hydra
sudo apt update
sudo apt install hydra-download-manager

The package is hydra-download-manager, not hydra — hydra in the Ubuntu archive is THC-Hydra, the login cracker, and it is what apt install hydra gives you.

PPA Repository: launchpad.net/~sonycore/+archive/ubuntu/hydra

Fedora / RHEL-based (Fedora COPR):

```bash sudo dnf copr enable sonycore/hydra sudo dnf instal