We always need to check the speed of the Internet connection at home and office. What we do for this? Go to websites like Speedtest.net and begin test. It loads JavaScript in the web browser and then select best server based upon ping and output the result. It also uses a Flash player to produce graphical results.
What about headless server, where isn’t any web based browser and the main point is, most of the servers are headless. The another bottleneck of such web browser based speed testing is that, you can’t schedule the speed testing at regular interval. Here comes an application “Speedtest-cli” that removes such bottlenecks and let you test the speed of Internet connection from command line.
#### What is Speedtest-cli ####
The application is basically a script developed in Python programming Language. It measures Internet Bandwidth speed bidirectionally. It used speedtest.net infrastructure to measure the speed. Speedtest-cli is able to list server based upon physical distance, test against specific server, and gives you URL to share the result of your internet speed test.
To install latest speedtest-cli tool in Linux systems, you must have Python 2.4-3.4 or higher version installed on the system.
### Install speedtest-cli in Linux ###
There are two ways to install speedtest-cli tool. The first method involves the use of `python-pip` package while the second method is to download the Python script, make it executable and run, here I will cover both ways….
#### Install speedtest-cli Using pythin-pip ####
First you need to install `python-pip` package, then afterwards you can install the speedtest-cli tool using pip command as shown below.
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo pip install speedtest-cli
To upgrade speedtest-cli, at later stage, use.
$ sudo pip install speedtest-cli --upgrade
#### Install speedtest-cli Using Python Script ####
First download the python script from github using wget command, unpack the downloaded file (master.zip) and extract it..
**6. The last stage generated a huge list of servers sorted on the basis of distance. How to get desired output? Say I only want to see the speedtest.net server located in Mumbai (India).**
**Note:** Latency reported by tool is not its goal and one should not rely on it. The relative latency values output is responsible for server selected to be tested against. CPU and Memory capacity will influence the result to certain extent.
### Conclusion ###
The tool is must for system administrators and developers. A simple script which runs without any issue. I must say that the application is wonderful, lightweight and do what it promises. I disliked Speedtest.net for the reason it was using flash, but speedtest-cli gave me a reason to love them.
speedtest_cli is a third party application and should not be used to automatically record the bandwidth speed. Speedtest.net is used by millions of users and it is a good idea to [Set Your Own Speedtest Mini Server][1].
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