Installing and using Speedtest CLI

In this article, I will give an example of installing and running the Speedtest CLI.

The easiest way is to download the archive from the Speedtest CLI from the official site https://www.speedtest.net/en/apps/cli, unzip it and run the speedtest file as I showed with the command below, after which the speed measurement will start. For example, for Ubuntu and CentOS, I downloaded the x86_64 archive.

./speedtest

You can also install the Speedtest CLI, for example, in CentOS 7 I installed according to the official instructions:

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/
# Other non-official binaries will conflict with Speedtest CLI
# Example how to remove using yum
# rpm -qa | grep speedtest | xargs -I {} sudo yum -y remove {}
sudo yum install speedtest

And in Ubuntu 18.04 like this:

sudo apt-get install gnupg1 apt-transport-https dirmngr
export INSTALL_KEY=379CE192D401AB61
# Ubuntu versions supported: xenial, bionic
# Debian versions supported: jessie, stretch, buster
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
# Other non-official binaries will conflict with Speedtest CLI
# Example how to remove using apt-get
# sudo apt-get remove speedtest-cli
sudo apt-get install speedtest

After installation, you can run Speedtest CLI by running the command:

speedtest

To run in verbose mode or to see which servers are selected:

speedtest -vvv
speedtest --selection-details

The list of servers can be found at http://www.speedtest.net/speedtest-servers.php.
And you can also see a list of nearby servers using the command:

speedtest --servers

Example of launching Speedtest CLI to the specified server:

speedtest --server-id=25121

If the server has several IP addresses or network interfaces, you can specify the necessary:

speedtest --ip=192.168.2.2
speedtest --interface=eth0

See also my articles:
Console speedtest
nload – monitoring network interface bandwidth
iperf – testing network bandwidth

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