Backstory: I wanted to share a meme I saw on Reddit's PrequelMemes subreddit. This one. Reddit does not make it easy to simply download and share a video file. I would prefer to share an actual file instead of a link to Reddit, whose website and mobile client is now incredibly poor in my experience. My Reddit client of choice, Apollo, provided this awesome functionality: direct video sharing. The app would export the video to a file when you attempted to share the post. If I recall correctly, the behavior was configurable in the app preferences. Ever since that app went defunct in 2023, I've stopped using Reddit. However, I knew there were a few high quality memes on there that I wanted to save and share. Therefore, I set out to put something together and I now had a good excuse to try Ruby.

Note: This is a work-in-progress and an incredibly naive implementation because I just wanted to get something working. This isn't a mature project.

./reddit-dl.rb <reddit-post-url>
./reddit-dl.rb -p [destination directory] <reddit-post-url>

You will need ruby installed. There is also one dependency that is not part of the standard library. Therefore, you will need to install it:

gem install nokigiri

This script will not download videos from Reddit posts in which the video is not hosted on Reddit (v.redd.it). Video hosts such as imgur.com are not (yet?) supported.