How to speedtest from the shell

The SpeedTest website uses a Flash program that may not work on many Linux browsers. If you prefer to check the download and upload bandwidth from the shell, I have shared some information below.

Warning: I found that the commandline tool consistently showed much lesser download/upload speeds compared to the website on my computers!

• Installation is easy:

$ sudo apt install speedtest-cli

• To check your speed:

$ speedtest-cli

I noticed that this can throw an error the very first time it is run:

$ sudo speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Cannot retrieve speedtest configuration
ERROR: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

This error goes away if I run the tool once in secure mode:

$ speedtest-cli --secure

Tried with: speedtest-cli 2.1.3 and Ubuntu 22.04