How to Install and Use wget

wget is a non-interactive downloader. Using wget, you can download files directly to your server or hosting account.

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 by allowing you to directly download the file to your server.

Install wget

[1] See if wget is installed. You can do so by running this command via SSH when logged in as root:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">which wget</syntaxhighlight>

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

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">/usr/bin/wget</syntaxhighlight>

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

CentOS/Redhat:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">yum install wget</syntaxhighlight>

Debian/Ubuntu:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">sudo apt-get install wget</syntaxhighlight>

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:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">wget http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest</syntaxhighlight>

And you're done!