BASH wrapper `download.sh` to be able to pull down multiple courses at once

[kigster]

Why?

I have about 30 Udemy courses that I bought, and wanted to watch them on my Plex. I was very happy to have found this amazing Python Script.

Unfortunately, I am not very proficient in Python, so it was easier for me to put together a shell script that uses udemy-dl to download (serially, or concurrently) course videos for any number of courses specified in a simple toml file shown below.

Using the download.sh script I was able to pull down 256GB of courses!

What's Included

• download.sh
• courses-example.toml
• .download.sh (a cache of the help screen for download.sh)
• updates to the README

Downloading Multiple Courses at Once (Serially, or in Parallel)

A provided shell script download.sh is able to download multiple course at once, provided the following file exists: courses.toml:

[todo]
url="https://www.udemy.com/course/ableton-live-11-masterclass"
url="https://www.udemy.com/course/ableton-push-workflow-and-production"
url="https://www.udemy.com/course/ableton-live-11-course"

[done]
url="https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-internet-security-privacy-course-volume-1"
url="https://www.udemy.com/course/the-easy-beginner-drum-course"

You don't need to have any URLs in the [done] section, but you must keep the [done] section header. The script grabs all URLs between [todo] and [done]

In addition, the script:

• Downloads its own BASH dependency — the bashmatic library and installs it in ~/.bashmatic
• Installs Python3 if not there
• Installs `FFmpeg
• Verifies that pip is a valid command, and remove the symlink if it's not (eg, points to a non-existent python distribution)
• Installs pip if not there
• Run pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To download multiple courses, follow these steps:

1. create the file courses.toml of the format described above and below (also, see courses-example.toml file).
2. create the file cookies.txt of the format access_token=XXX where XXX is your access token cookie (see above for how to get it).
3. choose the output directory, or use the default folder: ~/Courses which will be auto-created.
4. Run the script as follows:

# ./download.sh <courses-toml> [ optional-download-folder ]
# eg:
./download.sh courses.toml /Volume/ExternalHD/Courses

Downloading Concurrently

Using two additional environment variables you can tell the script to perform the operations in parallel, as well as to optionally generate the "info" file for each course, which is the result of the --info command.

export DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENTLY=1
export DOWNLOAD_INFO=1
./download.sh course.toml ~/Documents/Courses

[r0oth3x49]

@kigster udemy-dl do support downloading multiple courses sequentially from a file containing list of course urls separated by new lines. Thanks for the PR.

python udemy-dl -u USER -p PASS courses.txt

[kigster]

@r0oth3x49 I don't know how I missed that — where is that documented?