I have an unfortunate addiction to Humble Bundle book bundles. It’s a convenient way to get a lot of tech ebook content at a reasonable price. Also, I can get graphic novels and an occasional speculative fiction package of interest, usually in DRM free formats and not through a global monopolist.
That said, for all the time I’ve been buying from Humble Bundle, I’ve only had the web interface to download my purchases. For bulk downloads the UX wasn’t great so I turned to the Humble Bundle Downloader extension for Firefox. Did the trick for quite a bit, but age and rot seem to be setting in. Plus the extension was the only reason to launch Firefox. But the downloader did have the nice feature that it would rename files to match titles listed on the download page, making the results much more human friendly.
Difficulties downloading a recent bundle put me on tilt and I cast about for a better approach.
Enter humble-cli, “The missing CLI for downloading your Humble
Bundle purchases”. humble-cli is, you guessed it, a command line
interface tool for interacting with your Humble Bundle purchases. It
is sweet. Here’s a quick sample of how it lists purchases
crossjam@burningchrome:~$ ~/.cargo/bin/humble-cli list
...
a7nAf3UH3Vru8d3n | Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way by No Starch | 1.42 GiB | -
Ay3VN5rcSKrmt3d4 | Humble Tech Book Bundle: Data Engineering and Management by Pragmatic | 462.04 MiB | -
sRs4EtvxGf4hhDhb | Humble Tech Book Bundle: DevOps 2025 by O'Reilly | 348.66 MiB | -
bXPKrycBCSqbkhE7 | Humble Comics Bundle: Warren Ellis by Image Comics | 8.44 GiB | -
tDH8P68hkVWFnvNU | Humble Tech Book Bundle: Machine Learning, AI, and Bots by O'Reilly 2025 | 1.07 GiB | -
nT68upU5Kuhwxp2Y | Brian Michael Bendis' Jinxworld Bundle | 16.96 GiB | -
crossjam@burningchrome:~$
The tool is a Rust binary that can be easily installed via cargo
install. There’s a minor bit of finagling around in browser cookie
storage to go through an auth sequence which could be smoothed out,
but I’m not really complaining. Quite performant for downloading too
while having a similar file naming approach as the Firefox extension.
So far, so good. I’m looking forward to putting humble-cli through
further paces and reorganizing my collection.