Fetchster

A native macOS menu-bar download manager. It lives in the top bar (no Dock icon, no full window), with a dropdown that shows every download's progress, speed, ETA, and status — in the same look and feel as native macOS menu bar menus.

Website: https://phpflock.github.io/fetchster/

Features

• Menu bar only — a native NSStatusItem + NSPopover in the top bar, LSUIElement (no Dock icon), no main window.
• Add any link — click the + in the popover header, paste a URL, and it starts downloading. Any file type is supported.
• All download types
  • Regular HTTP/HTTPS/FTP files via native URLSession (with byte-range pause/resume: interrupted downloads keep a .part file and resume from the exact byte with Range: bytes=N-, plus queued concurrency control).
  • .torrent URLs and files, plus magnet: links, via the aria2 engine (DHT, peer exchange, magnet metadata). Completed torrents keep seeding, and rows show seeders/peers, up/down speed, and share ratio. Right-click a torrent for Update Trackers (re-announce / add public trackers), Copy Magnet Link, Copy Info Hash, Stop Seeding, and Remove & Delete Files.
  • YouTube and other yt-dlp sites — per-quality rows (2160p down to audio-only) via yt-dlp, merged into a single MP4 with ffmpeg. Works with your logged-in browser session.
• Browser capture (Chrome/Edge/Brave/Firefox) — the companion extension hands downloads to the app with the browser's exact request context (User-Agent, cookies, Referer, all headers), so servers see a real browser request. Right-click Download with Fetchster works for links and magnet: URLs too. The extension lives in Extensions/chrome and Extensions/firefox.
• Video grab — when a page plays a video, the extension reports the streams and the menu bar icon "pops". Open the popover for a Video detected section listing every format — direct files (MP4, WebM, MKV, …) with their size, HLS playlists, and DASH manifests expanded into per-quality rows (e.g. "1080p MP4"). Click one and it downloads with the page's headers; HLS and DASH streams are assembled with ffmpeg, and YouTube videos are listed/downloaded with yt-dlp. Blob/DRM streams aren't grab-able.
• Parallel to Apple's downloads — Fetchster runs its own download system with its own list and folder, independent of the Downloads dock stack:
  • Browsers (Chrome/Brave/Edge/Firefox): true interception via the extension, no save dialogs — files land straight in the app's Downloads folder.
  • Magnet links anywhere on the system: Fetchster registers as the handler for magnet: and opens .torrent files, so clicking a magnet in any app routes it here (one-time "Always allow" prompt).
• Native touches
  • Live progress bars, speed, ETA, and file sizes in the dropdown.
  • Icon pop + media list when a playing video is detected on a page.
  • Pause / resume / remove from the row or a context menu.
  • Torrent details: seeders, peers, upload speed, and ratio while seeding.
  • Reveal in Finder, open the download folder.
  • Sleep timer (☕) — keep the Mac awake for 30 min / 1 hr / 2 hrs / 6 hrs (runs caffeinate), with a live countdown in the header.
  • Completion notifications.
  • Launch at login.
  • Downloads list persists across relaunches; interrupted HTTP downloads are restored as paused (resume later), torrents are re-added automatically.
• Settings — download folder, concurrent download count, notifications, launch at login, plus on-demand engines:
  • Torrent downloads — downloads and starts the aria2 engine.
  • Media downloads — downloads yt-dlp + ffmpeg for YouTube, HLS & DASH. Engines are fetched only when enabled, so the app bundle stays small:
  • yt-dlp and ffmpeg come from their official sources automatically (yt-dlp's GitHub release, ffmpeg.org's recommended macOS builds), so updates arrive with upstream releases.
  • aria2 publishes no official macOS binary; upload dist/aria2.zip (aria2c + its dylibs + ossl-modules/legacy.dylib) as a GitHub release and set the engine.aria2.url UserDefaults key to its download URL (see dist/README-upload.md). The OpenSSL legacy provider module is mandatory — without it aria2 aborts with OSSL_PROVIDER_load 'legacy' failed and the engine fails verification. Per-engine overrides: engine.ytdlp.url, engine.ffmpeg.url.

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later (built and tested on Apple Silicon).
• Xcode Command Line Tools (Swift).

No extra installation is needed: the app bundles aria2c (with its relinked runtime libraries) for torrents, and a static ffmpeg for HLS/DASH media assembly — both inside the app bundle, so nothing needs to be installed.

Build & run

./Scripts/build.sh   # produces build/Fetchster.app
./Scripts/run.sh     # build + launch
./Scripts/install.sh # build + copy to /Applications (needed for Launch at Login)

Then click the download arrow in the menu bar. The + button accepts:

• https://example.com/file.zip
• magnet:?xt=urn:btih:…&dn=…
• a .torrent URL, or "Torrent File…" to pick a local .torrent

Browser capture

The app runs a small loopback server on 127.0.0.1:8765. Install the extension from Extensions/chrome (chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked). Then:

• Clicking a download link sends it to Fetchster with the page's headers; the browser's copy is cancelled instantly (no save dialog appears) and the file lands in Fetchster's Downloads folder. If the app isn't running, the browser downloads normally.
• Right-click any link → Download with Fetchster (works for magnet:).
• Toggle capture on/off from the extension popup, which also shows whether the app's server is reachable.

Two extension variants ship in this repo:

• Extensions/chrome — full-featured version for personal use (Developer mode / enterprise), including video grab.

• Extensions/chrome-store — the Chrome Web Store version: files, magnets, and torrents only, with no video features and no YouTube references. It talks to the app over Chrome native messaging instead of the loopback HTTP server, so it needs no host permissions. Register the native messaging host once per browser:

  ./Scripts/install_native_host.sh <extension-id>

  (The extension ID is shown on the extension card at chrome://extensions after loading the folder.)

Safari extension

The Safari integration lives in Extensions/safari (web extension code) and Safari (native bridge for Xcode). Safari extensions must be bundled inside a macOS app and code-signed; see Safari/README.md for the Xcode setup and signing steps.

Why not "hijack Apple's download system" entirely?

macOS has no public API to intercept another app's file writes or downloads — Apple's "download system" is just the Downloads folder plus each app's own download UI. True system-wide interception would require a network extension / transparent proxy with HTTPS interception (an installed root certificate, admin approval, and a paid Apple developer account), which breaks certificate-pinned apps and is generally not worth it. So Fetchster runs as a parallel system: it owns its own downloads (browsers, magnets, torrents), while Apple's Downloads folder remains untouched.

The app also registers the fetchster:// URL scheme, so links like fetchster://add?url=<encoded-url> add a download directly (useful for bookmarklets or other launchers). The default User-Agent (settable in Settings) is a modern Chrome-on-macOS string, and is used whenever the browser doesn't supply one.

How it works

• HTTPDownloadManager — URLSessionDownloadTask-based downloads with resume data, speed sampling, and per-host connection limits.
• TorrentEngine — launches the bundled aria2c with its JSON-RPC server enabled on 127.0.0.1:6800, and polls active/waiting/stopped downloads once per second to feed the same UI. The engine starts at app launch so the Settings status is always truthful.
• DownloadStore — single source of truth; persists the list to ~/Library/Application Support/Fetchster/downloads.json and resume data to …/resume/.
• LocalControlServer — the loopback JSON API used by the browser extension (/api/ping, /api/status, /api/download).
• The app is ad-hoc code-signed so it runs locally without a developer account.

Development: headless smoke test

Tools/TestHarness/main.swift exercises the real download engines (URLSession downloads, aria2 RPC, torrent/magnet handling, persistence) without the UI:

swiftc -O -o /tmp/idltest/harness \
  Sources/Fetchster/Models.swift \
  Sources/Fetchster/FileUtils.swift \
  Sources/Fetchster/HTTPDownloadManager.swift \
  Sources/Fetchster/TorrentEngine.swift \
  Sources/Fetchster/DownloadStore.swift \
  Tools/TestHarness/main.swift

Wrap the binary in a minimal .app bundle first, since UserNotifications requires a bundle to be present.

Roadmap ideas

• Speed-limit / schedule controls.
• Firefox and Safari versions of the capture extension.
• Global hotkey to show the menu.
• Per-download "open folder when done".