Speed test by ookla is one of the most trusted websites to check internet speed. It is one of the most popular & widely used tool to check internet speed using your browser.
Now it has also become the first official Linux-native tool to check the internet speed from Linux cli with a newly introduced application named ‘Speedtest CLI’. It not only measures internet upload, download speed, network packet loss but we can also set up automated scripts for collect performance data. Also, we can view test results in CSV, JSON, or JSONL formats.
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In this tutorial, we will learn to install & use Speedtest-CLI to check internet speed from Linux CLI. So let’s start the tutorial.
Installation on Ubuntu, Debian, popOS
Speedtest-CLI supports the following versions of Debian & Ubuntu,
Ubuntu versions supported: xenial, bionic
Debian versions supported: jessie, stretch, buster
One more thing to check is that you have not installed any other non-official binaries installed as it will conflict with this official version. To uninstall any other non-official version, use the following command,
$ sudo apt-get remove speedtest-cli
Once that’s done. We can now install Official Speedtest-cli, use the following commands to install it,
$ sudo apt-get install gnupg1 apt-transport-https dirmngr
$ export INSTALL_KEY=379CE192D401AB61
$ export DEB_DISTRO=$(lsb_release -sc)
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys $INSTALL_KEY
$ echo "deb https://ookla.bintray.com/debian ${DEB_DISTRO} main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/speedtest.list
$ sudo apt-get update
Next, run the following command,
$ sudo apt-get install speedtest
Installation on RedHat, Fedora or CentOS
Similarly, as we did for Ubuntu, we first need to uninstall any non-official version of Speedtest-cli first using the following command,
$ rpm -qa | grep speedtest | xargs -I {} sudo yum -y removeve {}
Now run the following commands to install speedtest-cli on your CentOS/Redhat or fedora systems,
$ sudo yum install wget
$ wget https://bintray.com/ookla/rhel/rpm -O bintray-ookla-rhel.repo
$ sudo mv bintray-ookla-rhel.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
$ sudo yum install speedtest
So now that we have speedtest-cli installed on our systems. We can now check the internet speed from Linux CLI or terminal.
Check internet speed
To check the internet speed from the Linux cli using speedtest, open terminal & execute the following command,
$ speedtest
Speed test will now start. There are plenty options that are supported by speedtest-cli, you can get the complete list of options supported by speedtest-cli using the following command,
$ speedtest --help
That’s it, this completes our tutorial on how to install and use Speedtest-CLI to check the internet speed from Linux CLI or terminal. Please feel free to redirect any questions or queries you have using the comment box below.
The Ookla client is official, and it’s good, but I haven’t been able to find the source for it. Not a huge problem, but more a violation of principle. I just did a review of many of the python clients on Github (the speedtest-cli that is in many repos is in python), and there are a number of nicer ones than the most often packaged one. There are also nice clients in Go.