How to download files using java

I've seen a lot of questions similar to mine answered, but they all vary. Is there a definite way to do this? I currently learning Java and don't have enough experience make functioning script for this.

Could anyone help? I personally think this is the best way to download a file from the web. When you download the file, it is stored in current running program, not on the hard drive, unless you specify it to. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How to download files using java and moving them to a directory?

Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 6 months ago. Below, we create a URL object with the link to the online file resource. Next, we create a local file where the downloaded file can reside. Just like the first example, we use the java. In the code, we have a URL object fetchWebsite that points to the source of the file.

We create an object of Path that tells the target where we want the file to be copied. Next, we open a stream to get the bytes from the online resource and pass the inputSteam to copy.

As it takes three arguments, the first and second are the inputStream and path objects, while the third specifies the CopyOption or the way the copy operation should be performed. We use StandardCopyOption. Download a File Using the java. FileOutputStream; import java. Now, in the following sections, we will be looking at ways to download files from a URL using third-party libraries instead of core Java functionality components. Now you may be thinking why would we use this when Java has its own set of libraries to handle IO operations.

However, Apache Commons IO overcomes the problem of code rewriting and helps avoid writing boilerplate code. In order to start using the Apache Commons IO library, you will need to download the jar files from the official website. When you are done downloading the jar files, you need to add them to use them.

If you are using an Integrated Development Environment IDE such as Eclipse , you will need to add the files to the build path of your project. There is only a single line of code required to download a file, which looks like:. The connection and read timeouts convey the permissible time for which either the connection may stay idle or reading from the URL may stop.

We will use the copy inputStream, fileOS method to download a file into the local system. Check out our hands-on, practical guide to learning Git, with best-practices, industry-accepted standards, and included cheat sheet. Stop Googling Git commands and actually learn it! The function returns the number of bytes copied. If the value of the variable i is -1, then it indicates that the contents of the file are over 2GB.

When the returned value is -1, you can use the function copyLarge inputStream, fileOS in place of the copy inputstream, fileOS function to handle this load. Both of these functions buffer the inputstream internally. The internal buffer means we do not have to use the BufferedInputStream class to enhance our code performance and helps us avoid writing boilerplate code.

Another library managed by the Apache organization is the HttpComponents package. This library uses the request-response mechanism to download the file from a given URL.

The first step to downloading a file is to create an HTTP client object that would issue the request to the server. For this, we will be using the CloseableHttpClient class. The code snippet that creates a new HTTP client is as follows:. We then need to create an HttpGet or HttpPost object to send the request to the server. The request is created by the following line of code:.