Test Your Internet Speed from the Linux Terminal with fast
What is FAST.com?
FAST.com is speed test gives you an estimate of your current Internet speed. It was created by Netflix to bring transparency to your upload / download speeds and to see if your ISP may be prioritizing traffic.I’ve run this quite a bit in a browser to do a quick spot check or my speeds, but I’ve never had a great tool to check this from some of my Linux machines. Let me clarify, some of my Linux servers that do not have a browser - that’s until I found this utility, fast.fast is an open source utility to run internet speed checks from machines that don’t have a browser, from the terminal, all in a small, zero dependency binary.You can read more about it on the GitHub repo.
Installing fast
We’re going to use curl so you’ll want to be sure you have it installed
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curl -V
This should return something similar to the following
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curl 7.68.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Release-Date: 2020-01-08
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: AsynchDNS brotli GSS-API HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz NTLM NTLM_WB PSL SPNEGO SSL TLS-SRP UnixSockets
Then we’ll want to download the latest fast binary by running
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LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/ddo/fast/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[0-9.]+')
curl -L https://github.com/ddo/fast/releases/download/v${LATEST_VERSION}/fast_linux_$(dpkg --print-architecture) -o fast
If you want to use wget instead of curl, you can run the following
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LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/ddo/fast/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[0-9.]+')
wget https://github.com/ddo/fast/releases/download/v${LATEST_VERSION}/fast_linux_$(dpkg --print-architecture) -O fast
Then we’ll want to make it executable by running
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chmod +x fast
Then we can run a speed test by running
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./fast
This should return something similar to the following
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âžś ~ ./fast
-> 477.72 Mbps
That’s it! You can now run an internet speed test from the Linux cli without a browser! What’s your download speed?
Links
⚙️ See all the hardware I recommend at https://l.technotim.live/gear
🚀 Don’t forget to check out the 🚀Launchpad repo with all of the quick start source files