As the commit history indicates, this project has been abandoned for quite a while. More information on why can be found in this comment. Long story short, circumventing CAPTCHA on gogoanime was becoming more and more tricky, until it eventually surpassed my expertise.

Assuming you came here looking for a simple and nice download utility, I have personally moved on to ani-cli which has been working great so I can highly recommend it! It does everything I intended this script to do at the core, and has many more neat features!

This script extracts the MP4 video file links for episodes found on <www.gogoanime.so> (or wheverever this points to). All episodes for a whole season are automatically extracted. Usage is basically as follows; no quotes must be used here, check Using the script further down for more details.

./gogoanime.py <search term>

Important to note is that the links are meant to be downloaded using aria2. Reason being that the links by themselves do not allow to download the episode; you also need to specify the referer request parameter. Plus, with aria2 we can neatly name our downloaded files. Recommended usage is as follows (command can be copy-pasted), more relevant flags can be found further down in section About downloading.

aria2c -i links.txt -c --auto-file-renaming false

The dependencies are managed using pipenv. Check https://realpython.com/pipenv-guide/ for a nice introduction to the tool. Use the first command to install the packages in a new virtual environment. Use the second variant to install the packages globally on your system. The installation method has an impact on how you actually run the code. The latter might be the preferred way for the end user.

pipenv install
pipenv install --system

Since we are relying on selenium to extract the links, you also need to install the corresponding browser and driver. We use Firefox here, for which you need the GeckoDriver.

On KDE Neon (which is based on Ubuntu) you can install them as follows.

# apt install firefox firefox-geckodriver

The links will be saved to a file in a corresponding folder located inside of $HOME/Videos/Anime. The download location can be changed by modifying the download_folder variable in the code. The script further tries to grab the highest resolution video found in the download page. Downloading should be taken care of outside of this program. To be noted is that the links file is structured for usage with the aria2 downloading utility.

./gogoanime.py <search term>

Upon hitting enter, the script will parse the gogoanime page for results given the search term and you will be prompted to select one by typing the number attributed to the entry. Entering a negative number will abort and exit the script. Alternatively ctrl+c also does the job.

Note that the search term must not be quoted. Internally, all command linke arguments will be concatenated which should make it less of a hassle to look for animes.

./gogoanime.py yahari ore

Once you have extracted the links with this script, you can run the following command. Note that you should be inside the directory where the links are stored, which by default is always a file called links.txt.

aria2c -i links.txt

To resume partially downloaded files use the -c or --continue flag.

aria2c -i links.txt -c

It may be preferred to use the following instead however, as aria2 by default downloads existing files again but simply renames them by adding a number. With the additional flag we tell aria to not rename existing files, which will cause aria2 to skip the download since by default files are not overwritten (see --allow-overwrite flag for aria2c).

aria2c -i links.txt -c --auto-file-renaming false

This last form is the most robust, since partially downloaded episodes will resume their download. At the same time, already downloaded episodes will not be re-downloaded or overwritten.

These commands are already plenty to download the episodes. However, aria2 has many options and the following flags are a relevant collection which allow to fine tune the downloading further if needed.

aria2c -i links.txt -c -x12 -s12 -k10M --auto-file-renaming false --max-overall-download-limit=3M

Flags are as follows:

Accessing the download page (when pressing the yellow download button on an episode on gogoanime) requires you to first complete a CAPTCHA verification. Circumventing this verification is seemingly only achievable by rendering the page with a browser (as it does not require any human intervention). For this reason, selenium is used allowing us to render the page in a headless browser and then to extract the download links. This is an automated process of course.

The first section in this code, called "Parameters", found after the imports, presents two dictionaries that you can and may have to tweak. They are called 'headers' and 'cookies'. The User-Agent header is important to set, because otherwise Python's request will be shut down due to being a bot. In elder versions of gogoanime, cookies were needed to enter the download page containing the video links. At this point in time, the cookies are not used anywhere in the code.