In this post, I will be talking about how to download Udemy courses for free. Here I will mention a free and open source command line tool to do the same. Udemy-dl is a simple tool that takes URL of the course you want to download and then it downloads that for you. It allows you to specify the quality of the videos as well and save them to a specified folder. However, to use this tool, you will just have to use your Udemy credentials to log in to your account to obtain cookies that will be used to download the content. And it can only download the courses that you have enrolled into.
Udemy offers one of the best online lectures with videos for different aspects. You can find courses related to programming, software testing, project management, and a lot others. Some courses are paid and some are free. You can enroll in any course and start watching the lectures. However, after enrolling into any course, you cannot download the videos. You can only watch them but here I will tell you how to download those videos. Udemy-dl tool takes the URL of the course and downloads all the content. And there is a very simple command to do that.
How to Download Udemy Courses Free with this Command Line Tool?
Udemy-dl tool is written in Python and you can easily set it up in your PC. It just requires Python to work and there are very simple commands to get started with it. For providing login information, you can either specify them manually. Or, it can even use the cookie data that you can extract from browser. But that requires knowledge of developer tool of the browser so I will just skip that part. You can try that by yourself by learning it from its GitHub page.
Here are the steps to use this tool to download Udemy courses.
Step 1: Download the repository of Udemy-dl by cloning it from here. After that, extract its ZIP file to a folder. After that, open a command prompt with admin rights there. Now, run the following command to install its dependencies.
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
Step 2: Now, you can start using the tool to download the Udemy courses. Get the link to the course from the My Courses section that you want to download. After that, run the following command. In the command also specify the login credentials (email/username and password).
python udemy-dl.py "CourseURL" -u "Username or Email" -p "Password"
After running the above command, you’ll see that it will start downloading the lecture videos one by one. By default, it will download high-resolution videos. But if you want videos with lower video quality, say 720 then just add “-q 720” in the above command. It will download the course videos in the same folder, you can see the above screenshot.
Closing thoughts
Udemy-dl is a very intelligent and a very powerful tool that you can use to download courses from Udemy. And there is a very simple command to do that. If you want to learn some other advance commands then you can find them all on the GitHub page of this tool.
