Downloading Magento Extensions – The Easy Way

The Problem

I'm sure you have had to search the Magento forums for a solution to a problem. Interestingly, a lot of problems people have go unanswered. Which raises the simple question: If you have forums but nobody answering anything, what good does it do to have forums in the first place? It seems Varien and the Magento team are more interested in the Enterprise Edition and other "big" projects than to answer user questions or even attempt to make an appearance.

Extension Keys - Are They Worthless?

I recently had download several extensions from MagentoConnect. Not wanting to download and install them right from Magento, I tried pear. Unfortunately it seems that the Magento channels are about as up-to-date as Magento team members visit the forums. Hardly at all.

There had to be an easier way to get my extensions. And there is! A little article on the Magento Wiki shows so far the BEST way to get an extension. Why they don't use this on MagentoConnect is beyond me.

Downloading Via Browser

The above mentioned article shows how to get extensions from the command line. But instead of using wget we will simply use our Browser (which wget essentially is).
http://connect.magentocommerce.com/TYPE/get/EXTENSION_NAME-X.X.X.tgz
Paste this URL into your browser and replace TYPE and EXTENSION_NAME-X.X.X with the type of extension and the extension name and version. That's it. So for example, for the (buggy) Amazon Payments extension, we have the extension key: magento-core/Mage_AmazonPayments. That means that the TYPE is core. To get the version, simply look at the Specs of the extension on MagentoConnect. Currently, the latest version for Amazon Payments is 1.1.3. So, our URL would be: http://connect.magentocommerce.com/core/get/Mage_AmazonPayments-1.1.3.tgz. Now you can now download the extension and ungzip and untar it. Of course, you can also do this right from SSH with wget. Which saves you downloading and uploading it to your Magento installation.

And there you have it. If you have any questions, please comment and we'll try to answer them as good as we can.

About Dave Haefliger

Dave “2.0” Haefliger is a simple and effective solutions kind of guy. He loves building applications that feel intuitive. Dave has an unnatural love for almost everything that comes from Apple. Most people don’t understand it, but he doesn’t care, really.