How to Install and Use wget

wget is a non-interactive downloader. You can skip a few steps for getting a download onto your server using it.

For example, let's say you want to install cPanel on your server. You would normally go to: http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest and download the latest install to your desktop. You would then have to open your FTP client and upload the file to your server.

wget cuts your time in half.

***Install wget***

First, you will want to see if wget is installed. You can do so by running this command via SSH when logged in as root:

which wget

If wget is installed, the output of the above command should be:

/usr/bin/wget

If wget is not installed on your server, here are the commands to install it for CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu when logged into your server via SSH as root:

CentOS:

yum install wget

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install wget

***Using wget***

Now that you have wget installed, you can issue the command to download any file that you have the URL for. You will want to make sure you're located in the directory where you're wanting to download the file to before issuing the wget command.

We were using cPanel as the example earlier, so the command would be:

wget http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest

And you're done!