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Introduction

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What comic-dl is, what it does, and whether it fits your setup.

On this page

comic-dl downloads comics and manga from the command line and packages them into CBZ, ZIP, or CBT archives for your reader.

Give it a gallery, chapter, or series URL from a supported site. It handles page downloads, image verification, and metadata.

What it does

Given the URL of a gallery, chapter, or series, comic-dl:

  1. resolves the URL to a scraper and reads the page metadata
  2. downloads each page image, 5 at a time by default
  3. verifies every response is an image
  4. packs the images into an archive with a ComicInfo.xml
  5. records the download so future runs can skip it
comic-dl -u "https://mangadex.org/title/<manga-uuid>"

The saved path is printed when a download completes.

What you get

34 built-in adapters, plus a generic HTML fallback that runs on any host without one. A site the tool has no adapter for can still be added as a separate Python package, without forking the project.

A series URL opens an interactive chapter picker. Scripts skip it with --chapters 1-3,5, or --chapters all.

Interrupted downloads resume from the pages already on disk, so a dropped connection costs you the missing pages and nothing else. Requests are paced per host, and every download that hits a retryable error pauses the whole run rather than pressing harder.

Archives carry ComicInfo.xml metadata, so the extraction-friendly readers (Tachiyomi, Komikku, Calibre) see a series title, chapter number, and reading direction instead of a folder of numbered images.

Linux and Windows ship prebuilt binaries. macOS builds from source. No account is needed beyond whatever the source site itself requires.

When to use comic-dl

Use it when you want to download content from a supported site in a repeatable, scriptable way. That covers one-off galleries, whole series, and nightly updates run from cron.

A note on maturity

Early release

comic-dl is an early release (0.0.x). Command-line options, configuration, and site support may change between releases. Reference this documentation for the version you have installed.

Responsible use

Use comic-dl only for content you are authorized to access. Respect terms of service, robots policies, copyright law, and the rights of content creators and publishers. comic-dl does not encourage bypassing authentication, paywalls, or other access controls.

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