download-anything

What This Skill Does

The download-anything skill is a comprehensive CLI-based utility designed to bridge the gap between complex resource retrieval and simple user commands. It serves as a unified interface for powerful open-source download tools like yt-dlp, aria2, and gallery-dl. Whether you are archiving academic papers, securing media from social platforms, or performing bulk downloads from cloud drives, this skill provides a robust framework to handle the heavy lifting while simplifying the command-line arguments into intuitive, high-level automation scripts.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, use the internal skill installer: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hacklyc/download-anything Once installed, ensure all backend utilities are present by running the included provisioning script: bash scripts/install-toolkit.sh. This ensures that dependencies like ffmpeg, aria2, and yt-dlp are correctly mapped to your system path.

Use Cases

This skill is highly versatile, supporting a wide range of digital acquisition tasks:

1. Media Preservation: Downloading high-quality video or audio from over 1,800 websites, with specific optimizations for YouTube and Bilibili.
2. Academic & Intellectual Research: Finding and downloading papers, ebooks, and courses through integrated reference documentation.
3. Content Aggregation: Batch downloading image galleries or music playlists using specialized handlers like spotdl.
4. System Administration: Utilizing high-speed multi-threaded downloads for software packages or direct file hosting links.
5. Asset Acquisition: Sourcing stock photography, audio snippets, and font files for creative projects.
6. Chinese Resource Access: Navigating search techniques for popular Chinese cloud drives (Baidu, Alibaba, Quark).

Example Prompts

• "Can you download the audio from this YouTube playlist and save it as high-quality mp3s?"
• "Help me find and download the latest version of the research paper on neural networks at this URL."
• "Batch download all images from this artist's gallery link and save them into a folder named 'gallery_backup'."

Tips & Limitations

• Cookies: For platforms like Bilibili, ensure you have cookie files configured if you encounter restricted content.
• Performance: Always prefer the scripts/dl-file.sh for large files to leverage aria2’s 16-connection speed advantage.
• Legal: Users are responsible for ensuring they have the rights to download and store the content retrieved. Use this tool ethically and respect copyright laws.
• Error Handling: If a download fails, check the site availability or your network configuration, as some platforms frequently change their anti-scraping measures.