apt-select

Select a fast, up to date Ubuntu apt mirror using flexible filters.

Features

Tests latency to mirrors in mirrors.txt.
- Each mirror is sent 3 TCP connection requests (on port 80) to gauge round trip time.
Prints latency, status, and bandwidth capacity of the fastest mirrors in a ranked list.
- Minimum round trip times determine rank.
- Status and bandwidth are scraped from launchpad.
Generates sources.list file using new mirror.
- New mirror can either be chosen from a list or generated automatically (default).
- Selected mirror is used to search /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all instances of the first urls labeled as the main/security repositories.

Python HTML parser, BeautifulSoup

sudo apt-get install 'python(3?)-bs4$'

List arguments and options:

./apt-select.py -h

Choose from the top 3 mirrors, including those last updated a week ago:

./apt-select.py -c -t 3 -m one-week-behind

Find the top 10 mirrors, output latency info only, and don't generate new config file:

./apt-select.py -t 10 -p -l

After new sources.list is generated in current working directory, backup and replace to update apt:

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup && \
sudo mv sources.list /etc/apt/

Currently, http and ftp are supported.

/etc/apt/sources.list should contain sources in the following format:

[deb|deb-src] [http|ftp]://mirror.example.com/path [component1] [component2] [...]