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The vocabulary of getting through
rewget lives in the world of TLS fingerprints and bot protection. If some of the terms on the how-it-works page were new, here they are in plain language.
- Drop-in replacement
- A tool that keeps the same command-line surface as the thing it replaces, so existing scripts work unchanged. rewget is a drop-in replacement for wget.
- Bot protection
- Server-side systems that block automated clients — via 403s, CAPTCHAs, or rate limits — while letting real browsers through. rewget exists to get past the fingerprint-based variety.
- TLS fingerprint
- A signature derived from the exact way a client negotiates a TLS handshake (cipher order, extensions, curves). Plain HTTP clients look different from browsers, which is how they get blocked.
- JA3 / JA4
- Common hashing schemes for TLS fingerprints. Bot-protection vendors compare a connection's JA3/JA4 against known-browser values; rewget's stage 2 presents a real browser fingerprint.
- HTTP/2 fingerprint
- Beyond TLS, the ordering and settings of HTTP/2 frames also identify a client. rewget's impersonation covers the HTTP/2 layer as well as TLS.
- JavaScript challenge
- An interstitial page that runs JavaScript a real browser must execute before the real content is served. Plain wget and curl only see the challenge HTML; rewget's stage 3 executes it.
- Headless browser
- A real browser engine running without a visible window, driven programmatically. rewget uses headless Chromium in stage 3 to solve JavaScript challenges.
- rquest
- The Rust HTTP client rewget uses in stage 2 to send requests with browser-accurate TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprints.
- chromiumoxide
- The Rust library rewget uses in stage 3 to drive headless Chromium over the DevTools protocol.
- Daemon (rewgetd)
- A background process that owns expensive resources — the browser pool and impersonation sessions — so the CLI stays a fast, thin shim. It starts on demand.
- Per-domain cache
- rewget remembers which fallback stage worked for each host and reuses it for seven days, so repeated downloads from the same domain skip the probing.
- Ed25519
- The signature scheme used to sign rewget's browser fingerprint profiles. Profiles are verified before use, so updates cannot inject unverified fingerprints.