oxdm

Download manager for Linux, macOS and Windows.

Features

• Lightweight UI. Drawn in software: no GPU, no toolkit. Every window is its own process and opens in about 90 ms.
• Scheduled queues. Run on a timetable, or only under conditions you pick: unmetered connection, AC power, an idle machine. When a run ends it can notify you, run a command, or shut the machine down.
• Segmented downloads. A file is split across connections.
• Browser capture. Downloads arrive from the extension with their cookies, headers and referrer, over WebSocket or native messaging.
• Resilient. Interrupted parts resume, and failures retry on a fixed-then-exponential backoff that you can configure.
• Per-job settings. Proxy, credentials, headers, cookies and checksum, with speed limits set globally or per job.
• Easy updates. It tells you a release is out; you download and install it from About.
• Scriptable. oxdm add, oxdm wait, oxdm resume and friends drive the running app from a terminal, a script or an AI agent, with JSON output and typed exit codes.

Install

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Downloads the release archive for your platform, checks it against the published SHA-256, installs oxdm and oxdm-native-host into ~/.local/bin, and adds a launcher entry.

Custom directory:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/install.sh | sh -s -- --dir /usr/local/bin

Windows

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/install.ps1 | iex

Installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\oxdm, adds it to your user PATH, drops a Start-menu shortcut.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/jd1378/oxdm
cd oxdm
cargo build --release --bins

No system dev libraries are needed beyond a C toolchain. Everything that talks to the desktop (tray, notifications, keyring, network and power state) goes over D-Bus in pure Rust, so there is nothing to install for it.

Outputs:

• target/release/oxdm: main app
• target/release/oxdm-native-host: browser native-messaging bridge

Packaging oxdm

If you are building oxdm for a distro repository, a Flatpak, or any other channel where a package manager owns the installed files, build it with:

OXDM_NO_SELF_UPDATE=1 cargo build --release --bins

That build never checks for a new version, never downloads one, and offers no way to install one: About shows the version and nothing else, and the update rows disappear from Settings → General and Settings → Notifications. The daemon refuses update requests over its own IPC socket too, so nothing left over from a previous install can start a self-install behind the package manager's back.

Settings → Advanced drops its "launcher entry" button for the same reason: the .desktop file and its icon are yours to ship, and a copy written to ~/.local/share/applications would shadow the packaged one.

Leave it unset for anything users install themselves — the tarball, the install scripts, a local build.

For development there is also cargo run -p oxdm-testserver, a local server whose endpoints each misbehave in one specific way (no ranges, unknown length, wrong checksums, ranges advertised but ignored). Its index page at http://127.0.0.1:8088/ lists them. It is a separate workspace member, so release builds do not include it.

Uninstall

Linux / macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/uninstall.sh | sh
# also wipe settings + queue DB
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/uninstall.sh | sh -s -- --purge

Windows:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/uninstall.ps1 | iex
# also wipe settings + queue DB
$env:OXDM_PURGE = "1"; irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/uninstall.ps1 | iex

Browser extension

The companion extension is published for both browsers:

• Chrome Web Store
• Firefox Add-ons

Tools → Browser extension links to the same pages.

The host side is a stable contract (see docs/EXTENSION_API.md), so any extension can use it. Both transports are supported:

• WebSocket at ws://127.0.0.1:<port>, simplest for development.
• Native messaging via the oxdm-native-host shim plus a per-OS manifest. oxdm registers the manifest itself: on first run, again whenever it finds one missing or stale, and on demand from Settings → Browser. oxdm --install-native-host [--chromium-id ID] does the same from a terminal.

The pairing code the extension asks for lives in Settings → Browser, with Copy and Regenerate buttons. It bundles the port and the auth token in one string.

Command line and AI agents

The oxdm binary also drives the running app. Whatever a script or an AI agent downloads this way lands in your list, where you can watch it, pause it, or resume it after an error. If oxdm is not running, the command starts it in the tray.

The first such download creates an Agent category (saving into Agent inside your download folder) and an Agent queue, so what your agents fetched is one click away in the sidebar, finished or not. Change the category's folder or queue in Settings → Categories. Delete either and it stays deleted, even through Reset Categories: downloads are then filed by type, or go to Main. oxdm restore-agent brings them back.

oxdm add https://example.com/big.iso --wait      # add, start, follow to the end
oxdm list --state failed                         # what went wrong
oxdm resume --failed --wait                      # pick them up where they stopped
oxdm help                                        # every command, exit codes, JSON contract

Add --format json for machine-readable output: one JSON object per line on stdout, and on failure one error object on stderr with a stable exit code (3 network, 4 needs a decision, 5 disk, 7 stopped by you, 124 timed out; the download itself carries on). Re-running the same oxdm add does not download twice: it resumes the existing download or reports it as already complete.

Agent skill

This repo ships an Agent Skill (the open SKILL.md standard) that teaches AI agents to download through oxdm and to handle its exit codes.

Linux / macOS:

# Interactive: asks which agent (claude/codex/...) and global vs. project
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/install-skill.sh | sh

# Non-interactive
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/tools/install-skill.sh | sh -s -- codex --project

tools/install-skill.sh --help covers other agents, --dir, and flattening into an AGENTS.md.

Windows (PowerShell):

# Claude Code, all projects. Other places: $HOME\.codex\skills\oxdm for
# Codex, or .claude\skills\oxdm (.codex\skills\oxdm) for this project only.
$d = "$HOME\.claude\skills\oxdm"; New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force $d | Out-Null
"SKILL.md", "reference.md", "examples.md" | % { irm "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jd1378/oxdm/main/plugins/oxdm/skills/oxdm/$_" -OutFile "$d\$_" }

Claude Code users can install it as a plugin instead, which keeps it updated:

/plugin marketplace add jd1378/oxdm
/plugin install oxdm@oxdm

Configuration

Settings + queue persist in a SQLite DB:

OS	path
Linux	~/.local/share/oxdm/db/oxdm.db
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/oxdm/db/oxdm.db
Windows	%APPDATA%\oxdm\db\oxdm.db

It has a directory to itself so a sandboxed browser can be granted read access to the database without also being given the working and update directories beside it. A database from before that change is moved into db/ the next time the daemon starts.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 jd1378

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Later versions of that license do not apply. It is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.