Run speedtest.net From the Command Line With speedtest-cli

For years, my “goto” source for measuring internet speed has been speedtest.net. Pointing my browser to speedtest.net, and a with few mouse clicks, I got my internet speeds for the moment. The absence of “flash” has made the GUI of speedtest.net even more usable, and it seems faster. Recently, the good people at Speedtest have created a downloadable app that allows you to get your results without even opening your browser.  But there is even another way to get your internet speed from speedtest.net, a little program called speedtest–cli.

Speedtest-cli allows you to run speedtest.net from the command line.  If you have “homebrew” installed on your Mac, then open the terminal and type:

brew install speedtest–cli

For Ubuntu (and I presume for other Debian based brothers), from the command line:  sudo apt-get install speedtest–cli

You can also download speedtest–cli from GitHub.

Once installed, just type in speedtest–cli at the command prompt, and here is what you will see:

Note, the second line in the example above, shows the command that initiated the test.  There are additional arguments you can add to the command string:

(From https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli)

Optional Arguments:

• -h, –help show this help message and exit
• –no-download Do not perform download test
• –no-upload Do not perform upload test
• –bytes Display values in bytes instead of bits. Does not
  affect the image generated by –share, nor output from
  —json or —csv
• –share Generate and provide a URL to the speedtest.net share
  results image, not displayed with —csv
  –simple Suppress verbose output, only show basic information
• —csv Suppress verbose output, only show basic information
  in CSV format. Speeds listed in bit/s and not affected
  by –bytes
  —csv-delimiter CSV_DELIMITER
• Single character delimiter to use in CSV output.
  Default “,”
  —csv-header Print CSV headers
• —json Suppress verbose output, only show basic information
  in JSON format. Speeds listed in bit/s and not
  affected by –bytes
• –list Display a list of speedtest.net servers sorted by
  distance
• –server SERVER Specify a server ID to test against
• –mini MINI URL of the Speedtest Mini server
• –source SOURCE Source IP address to bind to
  –timeout TIMEOUT HTTP timeout in seconds. Default 10
• –secure Use HTTPS instead of HTTP when communicating with
  speedtest.net operated servers
• –no-pre-allocate Do not pre allocate upload data. Pre allocation is
  enabled by default to improve upload performance. To
  support systems with insufficient memory, use this
  option to avoid a MemoryError
• –version Show the version number and exit