A polite downloader for Common Crawl data, written in Rust.

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Install

cargo install ccdown

Other methods

From source

git clone https://github.com/4thel00z/ccdown.git
cd ccdown
cargo install --path .

Pre-built binaries

Grab the latest release for your platform from the releases page.

Usage

1. Download the path manifest for a crawl

ccdown download-paths CC-MAIN-2025-08 warc ./paths

Supported subsets: segment warc wat wet robotstxt non200responses cc-index cc-index-table

Crawl format: CC-MAIN-YYYY-WW or CC-NEWS-YYYY-MM

2. Download the actual data

ccdown download ./paths/warc.paths.gz ./data

Options

Flag	Description	Default
-t	Number of concurrent downloads	10
-r	Max retries per file	1000
-p	Show progress bars	off
-f	Flat file output (no directory structure)	off
-n	Numbered output (for Ungoliant Pipeline)	off
-s	Abort on unrecoverable errors (401, 403, 404)	off

Example

ccdown download -p -t 5 ./paths/warc.paths.gz ./data

Note: Keep threads at 10 or below. Too many concurrent requests will get you 403'd by the server, and those errors are unrecoverable.

Python bindings

Install

pip install ccdown

Usage

from ccdown import Client

client = Client(threads=10, retries=1000, progress=True)

# Download the path manifest for a crawl
client.paths("CC-MAIN-2025-08", "warc").to("./paths")

# Download the actual data
client.download("./paths/warc.paths.gz").to("./data")

# Flat file output (no directory structure)
client.download("./paths/warc.paths.gz").files_only().to("./data")

# Numbered output + strict mode (abort on 401/403/404)
client.download("./paths/warc.paths.gz").numbered().strict().to("./data")

API

Client(threads=10, retries=1000, progress=False) — Create a client with shared config.

client.paths(snapshot, data_type) — Returns a builder. Call .to(dst) to download the path manifest.

client.download(path_file) — Returns a builder with chainable options:

• .files_only() — flatten directory structure
• .numbered() — enumerate output files (for Ungoliant)
• .strict() — abort on unrecoverable HTTP errors
• .to(dst) — execute the download

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0