Nearly all heavy internet users already familiar with Speedtest.net. It is one of the most favorite tools to test the internet connection speed. This tool becomes so popular since it provides accurate enough results. In addition to web, you can also use Speedtest.net on other platforms since this tool also available on macOS, Windows, Android, iOS to Windows Phone. What about Linux? That is what we are going to discuss here.

Speedtest.net hasn’t provided an official app for Linux. But, you can keep able to use it for checking your internet connection speed using speedtest-cli.

As you may can guess, speedtest-cli is a command line-based tool. This tool is developed by Matt Martz. The tool itself was written in Python. In order to make everything goes the way you want, you better updating your Python if you want to use this tool.

Speedtest-cli comes with a number of options. You can use this tool by just typing speedtest-cli in terminal. However, you can also use additional parameters to get the custom outputs. For instance, you can use the parameter of --no-downloadto ignore download speed during testing. Additionally, you can also set the custom server to get the best possible result. For instance, you probably want to test how fast your internet connection to connect you to a certain server in Brazil.

To see the list of available servers you can type the following command.

$ speedtest-cli --list

Meanwhile, to check the internet connection speed to a certain server, you can type the following command.

$ speedtest-cli --server 6493

Replace the digits with the ID of your preferred server. You can find the IDs on left-most column from the results of speedtest-cli --list

And eventually, here is how to install speedtest-cli in Linux. Please note I use Ubuntu 16.04 in this example.

$ apt-get install python-pip
$ pip install speedtest-cli

Or, if you want to install speedtest-cli from manually you can get the source code of this tool on GitHub. This open source tool is released under the Apache License.