Download files using FTP

What follows in this article is useful for working with legacy FTP servers.

Most browsers have disabled FTP download support. This article shows several different ways to download files using programs that function as FTP clients.

Method 1: Use wget

wget is a very common command line utility used to download files over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS protocols, and is widely available for Linux distributions as well as BSD-based OSes such as Mac OS.
https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

If you have a URL to a file on our FTP server, using wget is simple:

$ wget ftp://ftp.technexion.net/path/to/file/you/want/to/download

Installing wget on Ubuntu

If you don't already have it installed, here is how to install it on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install wget

Installing wget on Windows 10

Downloads for Windows 10 are available from:
https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/

We suggest to download wget.exe directly. Then you can run:

C:\Users\username> wget ftp://ftp.technexion.net/path/to/file

Method 2: Use curl

curl is another command line utility used to transfer data with URLs. It can be used to download files using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS (and many other protocols).
https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html

The command line is slightly more complicated. To save it to a filename with the same name as on our FTP server (normally this is preferred):

$ curl -O ftp://ftp.technexion.net/path/to/file/you/want/to/download

or, if you want to save it to a different file name locally, you can omit the -O option and redirect the output to a local file:

$ curl ftp://ftp.technexion.net/path/to/file/you/want/to/download >  path/to/local/filename

Method 3: FileZilla

FileZilla is a popular freeware FTP client with a GUI interface that works on different host OSes (Windows, Linux, Mac OS).

FileZilla may be downloaded from here:
https://filezilla-project.org/download.php

Once installed, you can enter the FTP server address in the correct box and click "QuickConnect" as shown below. There is no need to enter other login credentials.

Once logged in, you will be able to navigate the directory structure of the FTP server and download a file or files by selecting them and double-clicking. If selecting multiple files for download, you can use CTRL+click (or CMD+click on Mac OS) to highlight multiple files, followed by a right-click and selection "Download".