Camera, code, coffee

We've been combining work and travel lately, so measuring internet connection speed has become a part of our check-in ritual.

Speedtest had been my go-to tool for the job, until I stumbled upon LibreSpeed. Written in PHP with a dash of JavaScript, LibreSpeed can run on a local Linux machine, or it can be self-hosted on a remote server.

To run LibreSpeed locally, make sure that PHP is installed on your system, and clone the project's repository using the git clone https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest.git command. In the resulting speedtest directory, rename the desired file to index.html.

In the terminal, switch to the speedtest directory, and run the php -S localhost:8000 command. Open the localhost:8000 address in the browser to access the tool.

Deploying LibreSpeed on a web server or VPS is not particularly difficult either. Assuming the VPS is running a Debian or Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, install Apache2, PHP, and Git on it:

su
apt install apache2 php git

Switch to the document root of the web server (by default, it's /var/www/html), and clone then project's repository using the git clone https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest.git command. Rename the desired example file to index.html. Set the correct permissions for the speedtest directory with the chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/speedtest/ command, and you're done.