FTP in 2026. Yes, Really.
Before you judge me — I know FTP is ancient. I was there when it was new. But guess what? Some data providers out there (no, I won’t tell you which ones) are still using it. And they’re not changing anytime soon.
I needed a fast, scriptable FTP downloader that I could plug into runme — my terminal dashboard for managing multiple processes. The idea was to have it as part of an automated workflow: download files from FTP, process them, move on. No babysitting.
Every GUI client was too slow and too manual for that. The command line ftp tool works but try scripting with it. Good luck.
So I wrote ftp_downloader in Rust. Why Rust? Because I’m learning it and every Rust project feels like a puzzle. The borrow checker yells at you, you fix it, and somehow you end up with code that just works.
It has a Norton Commander-style TUI (blue background, double borders, progress bar — the whole retro vibe) but also a headless console mode (--nogui) for scripts and automation. Configure everything in a TOML file, point it at a directory, and it downloads everything — skipping files you already have, preserving timestamps, and giving you an error report at the end. Fast, scriptable, and it plays nice with runme.
Are there 1,000 ways to do this with curl, wget, or a bash one-liner? Absolutely. But this one is mine. 😏
If you need it, it’s there. If you don’t, keep scrolling — that GitHub space isn’t yours anyway.
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