I wanted to download a torrent on my OS X 10.11 El Capitan system. I've been using rtorrent for this for a while now, which I like because it lets me download torrents without a silly GUI to bother with.

When trying to install rtorrent through Homebrew, I got this message.

$ brew install rtorrent
Error: No available formula with the name "rtorrent"
==> Searching for similarly named formulae...
Error: No similarly named formulae found.
==> Searching taps...
Error: No formulae found in taps.

After some detective work, I discovered rtorrent is simply removed from Homebrew these days because it's too hard to get to build in El Capitan. I gave it a feeble attempt at building it myself, but I didn't have a lot of luck either.

I started looking for alternatives, and found aria2 which isn't quite a traditional torrent client, but it does download torrents – which is exactly what I want! I don't really want a torrent client, I just thought that's what I had to have. All I really want is to run a command which will download the contents of a torrent, and that's what aria2 does.