Technical Notes¶

This document describes additional technical information of aria2. The expected audience is developers.

Control File (*.aria2) Format¶

The control file uses a binary format to store progress information of a download. Here is the diagram for each field:

 0                   1                   2                   3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+---+-------+-------+-------------------------------------------+
|VER|  EXT  |INFO   |INFO HASH ...                              |
|(2)|  (4)  |HASH   | (INFO HASH LENGTH)                        |
|   |       |LENGTH |                                           |
|   |       |  (4)  |                                           |
+---+---+---+-------+---+---------------+-------+---------------+
|PIECE  |TOTAL LENGTH   |UPLOAD LENGTH  |BIT-   |BITFIELD ...   |
|LENGTH |     (8)       |     (8)       |FIELD  | (BITFIELD     |
|  (4)  |               |               |LENGTH |  LENGTH)      |
|       |               |               |  (4)  |               |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------------+
|NUM    |INDEX  |LENGTH |PIECE  |PIECE BITFIELD ...             |
|IN-    |  (4)  |  (4)  |BIT-   | (PIECE BITFIELD LENGTH)       |
|FLIGHT |       |       |FIELD  |                               |
|PIECE  |       |       |LENGTH |                               |
|  (4)  |       |       |  (4)  |                               |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------+

        ^                                                       ^
        |                                                       |
        +-------------------------------------------------------+
                Repeated in (NUM IN-FLIGHT) PIECE times

VER (VERSION): 2 bytes: Should be either version 0(0x0000) or version 1(0x0001). In version 1, all multi-byte integers are saved in network byte order(big endian). In version 0, all multi-byte integers are saved in host byte order. aria2 1.4.1 can read both versions and only writes a control file in version 1 format. version 0 support will be disappear in the future version.
EXT (EXTENSION): 4 bytes: If LSB is 1(i.e. EXT[3]&1 == 1), aria2 checks whether the saved !InfoHash and current downloading one are the same. If they are not the same, an exception is thrown. This is called “infoHashCheck” extension.
INFO HASH LENGTH: 4 bytes: The length of InfoHash that is located after this field. If “infoHashCheck” extension is enabled, if this value is 0, then an exception is thrown. For http/ftp downloads, this value should be 0.
INFO HASH: (INFO HASH LENGTH) bytes: BitTorrent InfoHash.
PIECE LENGTH: 4 bytes: The length of the piece.
TOTAL LENGTH: 8 bytes: The total length of the download.
UPLOAD LENGTH: 8 bytes: The uploaded length in this download.
BITFIELD LENGTH: 4 bytes: The length of bitfield.
BITFIELD: (BITFIELD LENGTH) bytes: This is the bitfield which represents current download progress.
NUM IN-FLIGHT PIECE: 4 bytes: The number of in-flight pieces. These piece is not marked ‘downloaded’ in the bitfield, but it has at least one downloaded chunk.

The following 4 fields are repeated in (NUM IN-FLIGHT PIECE) times.

INDEX: 4 bytes: The index of the piece.
LENGTH: 4 bytes: The length of the piece.
PIECE BITFIELD LENGTH: 4 bytes: The length of bitfield of this piece.
PIECE BITFIELD: (PIECE BITFIELD LENGTH) bytes: The bitfield of this piece. The each bit represents 16KiB chunk.

DHT routing table file format¶

aria2 saves IPv4 DHT routing table in ${HOME}/.aria2/dht.dat and IPv6 DHT routing table in ${HOME}/.aria2/dht6.dat by default.

dht.dat and dht6.dat files use same binary encoding and have following fields. All multi byte integers are in network byte order. RSV (RESERVED) fields are reserved for future use. For now they should be all zeros:

 0                   1                   2                   3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+---+-+---+-----+---------------+---------------+---------------+
|MGC|F|VER| RSV |     MTIME     |     RSV       |LOCAL NODE ID  :
|(2)|M|(2)| (3) |      (8)      |     (8)       |      (20)     :
|   |T|   |     |               |               |               :
+---+-+---+-----+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------------+
:LOCAL NODE ID          |  RSV  |  NUM  |  RSV  |
:  (continued)          |  (4)  |  NODE |  (4)  |
:                       |       |  (4)  |       |
+-+-------------+-------+-------+-+-----+-------+---------------+
|P|     RSV     |COMPACT PEER INFO|            RSV              | <-+
|L|     (7)     |     (PLEN)      |         (24 - PLEN)         |   |
|E|             |                 |                             |   |
|N|             |                 |                             |   |
+-+-------------+-----------------+-----+-------+---------------+   |
|            NODE ID                    |  RSV  |                   |
|             (20)                      |  (4)  | <-----------------+
+---------------------------------------+-------+   Repeated in
                                                     (NUM NODE) times.

MGC (MAGIC): 2 bytes: It must be 0xa1 0xa2.
FMT (FORMAT ID): 1 byte: The format ID should be 0x02.
VER (VERSION): 2 bytes: The version number should be 0x00 0x03.
MTIME: 8 bytes: This is the time when aria2 saved the file. The value is the time since the Epoch(1970/1/1 00:00:00) in 64 bits integer.
LOCALNODE ID: 20 bytes: Node ID of the client.
NUM NODE: 4 bytes: The number of nodes the routing table has. NUM NODE node information follows.

The data of NUM NODE node will follow. The node information are stored in the following fields. They are repeated in NUM NODE times.

PLEN (COMPACT PEER INFO LENGTH): 1 byte: The length of compact peer info. For IPv4 DHT, it must be 6. For IPv6 DHT, it must be 18.
COMPACT PEER INFO: (PLEN) bytes: The address and port of peer in compact peer format.
NODE ID: 20 bytes: The node ID of this node.