How do I download a binary file over HTTP?

The simplest way is the platform-specific solution:

 #!/usr/bin/env ruby
`wget http://somedomain.net/flv/sample/sample.flv`

Probably you are searching for:

require 'net/http'
# Must be somedomain.net instead of somedomain.net/, otherwise, it will throw exception.
Net::HTTP.start("somedomain.net") do |http|
    resp = http.get("/flv/sample/sample.flv")
    open("sample.flv", "wb") do |file|
        file.write(resp.body)
    end
end
puts "Done."

Edit: Changed. Thank You.

Edit2: The solution which saves part of a file while downloading:

# instead of http.get
f = open('sample.flv')
begin
    http.request_get('/sample.flv') do |resp|
        resp.read_body do |segment|
            f.write(segment)
        end
    end
ensure
    f.close()
end

Example 3 in the Ruby's net/http documentation shows how to download a document over HTTP, and to output the file instead of just loading it into memory, substitute puts with a binary write to a file, e.g. as shown in Dejw's answer.

More complex cases are shown further down in the same document.

Following solutions will first read the whole content to memory before writing it to disc (for more i/o efficient solutions look at the other answers).

You can use open-uri, which is a one liner

require 'open-uri'
content = open('http://example.com').read

Or by using net/http

require 'net/http'
File.write("file_name", Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://url.com")))